Neuroscience prof taps into time perception

Christophe Le Dantec, an assistant professor of neuroscience in La Sierra University’s psychology department, aims to understand how the human brain processes time through research underway in his lab in Ambs Hall. He is measuring subjects’ brain activities and the reaction times to visual stimuli, such as a spot on a screen lasting for a certain duration. The subjects, who are La Sierra students, sit in a soundproof booth facing an ultra high-definition monitor and press a button to indicate if the duration of the stimulus presented is shorter or longer than one presented earlier. 

Le Dantec plans to install during spring break, a Faraday cage around the booth to improve the quality of the brain activities recorded. He also plans to increase the number of research participants. “We just started with five subjects,” he said. “This [winter] quarter we are planning to use 20 to 25 subjects.”

The students receive research credit for their participation in experiments, which is required for general psychology classes. Neuroscience research will involve use of a new electroencephalogram, or EEG machine Le Dantec purchased for the lab. The EEG instrument measures brain activities through electrical activity along the scalp. This technique is traditionally used to help analyze disorders of the brain such as epilepsy and sleep abnormalities. Participants in EEG research wear an adapted cap equipped with 32 electrodes attached by thin wires to the EEG machine. An additional eight electrodes can be placed on the subject’s face to record eye and other movements. Electrical signals that spread over the scalp are visible on the EEG monitor.

Going forward, Le Dantec would like to conduct experiments with schizophrenia, a mental illness that in some cases results in sufferers experiencing hallucinations such as hearing voices in their heads. Some theorize that particular symptoms in schizophrenia, including these hallucinations, stem from an inability to appropriately process temporal information and hypothesize that a delay may occur between thoughts and hearing those thoughts in one’s mind, Le Dantec said. “We all have this little voice in our head and we know that it is ours when we hear it. An abnormal delay in between could explain some auditory hallucinations experienced by schizophrenic patients. If we find some proof of this hypothesis, it could really help with those patients by providing them with some cognitive strategies to over come their deficit,” he said. “With practice, a patient could conceivably train to reduce the time delay between stimuli and recognition of the stimuli, disentangling the illusions.”

Additionally, Le Dantec is interested, among many other areas of research, in using the EEG instrument in parallel with behavioral measures, to determine which part of the brain is involved in processing nonverbal communication. For instance, he would like to investigate how some people are better able to detect when others are telling lies based on some conscious or subconscious indices. He also wants to analyze the impacts of specific brain stimulation on the ability for empathy, and for creative, outside-the-box problem solving.

“If we think a situation is this way or that way, we tend to persist in the mistakes,” he said. “If we can find a way to stimulate the brain properly, we should be able to modify brain activity and change that tendency.”