At Home Brain Scans

Ready for testing.

Image: Julian Russell/PhotoShelter

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I'm in a bathrobe clutching a stuffed otter trailing wires while seven strangers watch me climb into bed.

Trailing from the fuzzy animal's rear end are two wires. One leads out of my hotel bedroom and into an anteroom where the people now saying good night have set up monitors and laptops. The other is attached to an electrode affixed to my forehead.

I'm at the Estancia resort in La Jolla, California, where researchers at a San Diego start-up company called NeuroVigil are investigating what my brain is doing during the one-third of my life that I spend asleep.

The founder of NeuroVigil is Philip Low, a young neuroscientist who also holds a chair at the Salk Institute, which sprawls out just to the north of the Estancia, abutting the beach and the Pacific Ocean.

Low and his team are experimenting with a prototype of a new invention called the iBrain, which uses a single electrode attached to the forehead that measures brain activity during sleep.

Most sleep-measurement devices are multiple electrode caps that need to be run in a controlled setting, such as a hospital. The iBrain, when it is finished, will be used in a person's home—or, in my case, in the bedroom of this rather posh suite.

The finished iBrain will be wireless, says Low, and will report data during the night to NeuroVigil's data centers via one's own laptop, via the internet, or perhaps via the device itself.

But will the commercial version be imbedded in a stuffed otter, as this one is? Low says probably not; the otter was added at the last minute to protect the ungainly iBrain prototype from being squashed if I roll over in my sleep. Presumably, the real product will be smaller and less fragile.

NeuroVigil, which plans to sell the iBrain to researchers, physicians, hospitals, businesses, and consumers, will analyze the brain waves it picks up using a patented algorithm also developed by Low. The program, he says, uses grids to detect structural changes that occur in a sleeping person's brain and can reveal neurological disorders.

"We are using sleep as a microscope to study brain activity," Low said.

With long, wavy-black hair, a penchant for European-cut suits, and a charismatic intensity, Low came to the Salk in 2001 at the invitation of Nobel laureate Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA. Low and Crick worked together on sleep until Crick's death in 2004.

Still in his twenties, Low finished his Ph.D. in 2007, which he said was just one page in length, with a very long footnote titled, "A New Way to Look at Sleep: Separation & Convergence." Low is a fellow at the Crick-Jacobs Center
for Theoretical and Computational Biology at Salk.

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