The search for a better brain-imaging technology has taken a novel turn at Hitachi Advanced Research Labs in Hatoyama, Japan. The company's researchers aren't just perfecting a new imaging machine-a reasonable goal for the electronics giant-they are helping to conduct basic brain-science studies geared at improving education and even promoting world peace. To achieve those goals, researchers are using imaging advances to do everything from observing the pathways of comprehension in newborns to tracking the ways an adult brain compensates for injuries while it performs such high-level tasks as writing, solving math problems, and responding to spoken commands.

Hitachi's technology, known as optical topography, is well suited for such studies. Unlike other brain-imaging methods, optical topography allows the patient to sit, move, write, and talk while it monitors activity in specific regions of the subject's cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain where such functions as language are handled. The patient simply wears headgear festooned with optical probes and detectors, and the imaging system uses near-infrared light to provide a view of blood flow. Changes in blood flow might indicate comprehension: for example, flow to the language areas of the cerebral cortex increases when the patient recognizes spoken words. Optical topography detects such changes because although near-infrared light passes through skin and skull, it is absorbed in the cerebral cortex by hemoglobin in the blood. The more blood flow, the more hemoglobin-and the less light is reflected back to the device's detectors.