The knife slices into juicy flesh, liquid spilling over Randy McIntosh's hand. He flings another ingredient into the pan. When this researcher isn't using his brain to find ways to see into yours, he's in the kitchen, cooking up another original feast.
"The nice thing about cooking is you start with a way from going from this mess of ingredients to a meal, but along the way you might change things," he explains. "Despite what people think, that's how the brain works."
According to Dr. McIntosh, if one brain area is disrupted, others cover the gap, with varying degrees of success. Slurred speech after a stroke may not be due to the injury: It could be the brain's flawed effort to recover from injury. The brain reorganizes itself, but never in exactly the same way. "That's how cooking is. You don't put exactly the same amount of salt in each time, but the final meal is much the same," Dr. McIntosh says.
The brain is not like a computer, he adds, describing it rather as an orchestra in which each section acts in relation to every other section.
For his work at the Rotman Research Institute, which is part of the Baycrest Centre, volunteers are hooked up to machines that record brain activity. They then do a variety of tasks to gauge reaction time, memory, attention and other functions, and the results are turned into a map of the brain's function (its "dynamic range"). Some brains exhibit more localized activity, while others have a larger dynamic range. Under current theory, the more widespread the brain's function, the better a person's ability to recover from injury.
"It has pretty profound implications about how mental function comes about, but also how to deal with disease," Dr. McIntosh says.
Toronto is one of three or four centres in the world pursuing this idea, and Baycrest hopes to open a Centre for Brain Fitness by the end of this year. In the meantime, Dr. McIntosh is wading through dynamic-range maps in a bid to create standard maps that could be used to predict treatment outcomes.
Dr. McIntosh hopes to create a five-minute diagnostic test one day that would gauge the health of a person's brain and pick up any changes or early problems, with referral for a full test if necessary. Plus, dynamic-range mapping during rehabilitation could show in real time whether it's working, he notes.
"I think we're at the point now in understanding how the brain works that we need a new perspective on the whole enterprise," he says.
