The quantum revolution: brain waves

This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast: ‘The quantum revolution — brain waves’

Madhumita Murgia
Hi, my name is Madhumita Murgia, and I’m one of the presenters of Tech Tonic. We’re looking for some feedback from our listeners about the show, so if you have a second, please fill out our brief listener survey, which you can find at FT.com/techtonicsurvey.

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So far in this season of Tech Tonic, we’ve been talking about quantum computers and how they could bring about a quantum revolution. But computers aren’t the only forms of technology being built today that use quantum physics.

Margot Taylor
OK. So all right. Do you want to come in? This is our little participant today. She’s a little shy.

Madhumita Murgia
In a hospital in Toronto in Canada, researcher Margot Taylor is using quantum technology to see in to the brains of young children. Today, Margot is scanning the brain of a four-year-old girl. She’s quiet and shy, and she’s holding tight to her dad’s hand as Margot gets her set up in her lab.

Margot Taylor
She’s going into the magnetically shielded room, which is a big room. And then she sits in this rocking chair, and here is the helmet, and it goes on. It’s got all these sensors in the helmet, and it goes on her hand just like that, like a bicycle helmet.

Madhumita Murgia
The little girl climbs into a big padded chair and sits quietly as a brightly coloured plastic helmet is fitted on to her head. But this is no ordinary helmet. It’s a quantum brain scanner fitted with a raft of sensors that use quantum physics to detect brain activity.

Margot Taylor
OK. Are you ready? Are you ready to go? All right (door shutting sound). So the door’s now shut. And so now the sensors are calibrated, and so we can record all the different frequencies and get measures of ongoing brain activity.

Madhumita Murgia
Margot shows the little girl different images and videos to elicit different responses in her brain — pictures of different faces with different expressions mixed with abstract shapes.

Margot Taylor
And so she is now watching these stimuli. And then in between you can see also there are occasional cartoon characters. And that is just so the children are watching for the cartoon characters that keeps them engaged.

Madhumita Murgia
All the while, the quantum sensors in the helmet pick up the electromagnetic fields generated by the brain’s billions of firing neurons.

Margot Taylor
So this is our stimulus computer, and it’s just the operating panel on the, on the right, and on the left, we have the ongoing activity coming from these sensors.

Madhumita Murgia
It means Margot can watch the little girl’s brain working in real time right there on her computer screen. Margot has spent her career trying to understand children’s brains, but until now, it’s been virtually impossible to get an accurate picture of what’s going on inside them because the brain scanners in general use today don’t work on small children. They need subjects to stay really still, and small children tend to move and wriggle about. But now, a new generation of quantum-powered brain scanners has changed all that. And they’re giving researchers like Margot a window into the workings of young brains that they’ve never had before. Margot says this new quantum technology feels like a miracle.

Margot Taylor
This is the first time we’ve been able to see brain function in young children. Absolutely astoundingly good recordings of brain function. We can study infants and look at their real-time ongoing brain activity. I think this is revolutionary. I am very grateful to be able to work with these quantum sensors.

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Madhumita Murgia
This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I am Madhumita Murgia.

John Thornhill
And I’m John Thornhill. In this season, we’ve been asking if we’re on the brink of a quantum revolution. Most of that conversation has been about quantum computers. The idea that new, powerful computers based on quantum physics will transform computing, solve all kinds of problems and upend whole industries in the process. But quantum computers are just one part of the quantum technology being developed today. Other technologies that use quantum physics, things like quantum sensors and quantum communication networks, are also being touted as game changing innovations. So in this episode, we’re looking beyond the computers and asking if the wider world of quantum technology is where the quantum revolution is really taking place.

Madhumita Murgia
Margot Taylor’s research in Toronto is a great example of where quantum technology is already having a real-world impact. She works at the Hospital for Sick Children, and the research she’s doing right now focuses on autism, a condition that emerges in childhood. So in her lab, she’s scanning children’s brains to look for brain activity associated with autism.

Margot Taylor
So this is one of our tasks that we present to them. Now, you can see that there are emotional faces being presented, happy and angry faces. And we present them particularly because people with autism, one of their main difficulties is in the perception and understanding emotional faces.

Madhumita Murgia
Despite decades of research, there’s still a lot we don’t know about autism and what causes it. We know it develops in childhood and that there’s probably a genetic component to it because it tends to run in families. Researchers have known for years that there are certain patterns of brain activity associated with autism. And using brain scans, these patterns have been found in adults and older children with autism. Margot thinks that these same patterns of brain activity could be present in younger children even before they develop symptoms of the condition.

Margot Taylor
So we’re looking for a brain signature that could predict the likelihood of developing autism.

Madhumita Murgia
If she’s right, it might help to explain how autism emerges in young brains, and it could help identify at a young age the children who might develop the condition.

Margot Taylor
And if that’s the case, then as soon as that an atypical signature is seen, then interventions could be started right away. Behavioural interventions work. They help them improve the quality of life of the child and family. And the earlier they start, the better it is. The other aspect is that if we find a reliable brain signature, then that could help guide future research because there are pharmaceutical interventions that can be developed.

Madhumita Murgia
Margot’s research could be groundbreaking. That’s because until now, researchers haven’t been able to look for the brain signature for autism in young children. In fact, they haven’t been able to observe the brain functioning of young children much at all. That’s because existing brain scanners don’t really work on kids. They’re too big, and crucially to work, they need the person being scanned to do something that children find really hard to do.

Margot Taylor
The participant has to stay perfectly still and little children don’t stay perfectly still.

Madhumita Murgia
Margot likens the older brain scanners to massive old fashioned hair dryers you might find in a 1950s hair salon.

Margot Taylor
But it’s quite a ways away from the person’s head because the sensors are cooled with liquid helium, and so they have to be kept a long ways away from the head. And then if you put a small head into that, so like one size fits all, you can imagine putting a little child in an adult hairdryer in a salon, there’d be so much room around that the signal is very impoverished at that point.

Madhumita Murgia
So for years, getting good data on what was actually going on in children’s brains was basically impossible. And for people like Margot, who’s particularly interested in children’s brains, that was hugely frustrating. But in recent years, developments in quantum technology have changed all that. New brain scanning technology using quantum physics has been developed by people like this man, Matt Brookes.

Matthew Brookes
I’m a professor of physics at the University of Nottingham, and I’ve been working for nearly 20 years on various different types of human brain imaging.

Madhumita Murgia
Matt is part of the team that developed the quantum brain scanner Margot is now using in her lab.

Matthew Brookes
In recent years, there’s been a new generation of quantum devices, and in our case quantum sensors, that have come along that have really fundamentally changed what we can do. These new sensors are very small. They’re about the size of a Lego brick. The device looks like a bike helmet. It’s about the same weight as a bike helmet, but a bike helmet with lots of these little Lego bricks. And so you just put it on your head that gets the sensors close to your head. And then you measure magnetic fields have been generated by the brain as we carry out tasks.

Madhumita Murgia
Because the sensors are closer to the head, they pick up clearer signals from the brain, and the person being scanned can move around.

Matthew Brookes
So with this, because it’s just a helmet, the sensors move with the head. So you can stand up and you can go for a walk. You can behave normally. You can move your arms around. You can maybe head around. You can do different tasks.

Madhumita Murgia
This means the technology can be used to scan brains, where the subjects have difficulty staying still. And that’s not just children. Measuring brain function in patients with Parkinson’s, for example, or studying the brain when seizures happen in epilepsy. But for researchers like Margot, it means they’re getting their first real insight into something they’ve spent their whole career studying from a distance, the brains of young children.

Margot Taylor
It is very, very exciting. Oh, we thought it was a miracle (laughs). We hadn’t seen really good recordings of ongoing brain function in little children before. So for me, this is just a tremendous breakthrough.

Madhumita Murgia
Like quantum computers, quantum sensors are an example of how our understanding of quantum physics is being used to develop a new and exciting technology. The quantum sensors aren’t just used for scanning brains. They’re being developed for all kinds of uses to measure changes deep on the ground, making better navigation systems, driverless cars, in building the world’s most accurate clocks. And Matt Brookes says that unlike quantum computing, you don’t have to look years or decades into the future to see the applications for quantum sensors. They are being used today.

Matthew Brookes
A lot of people, when they think about quantum technology, they immediately think of quantum computing, which is interesting, is exciting, but it’s not the only game in town. Actually, quantum sensors are far more advanced that are already being used in applications like this and other applications, and they really do work. And so I think there’s certainly a hype around quantum computing, and it’s sometimes frustrating that because of that hype, actually a lot of the other work that’s being done in the quantum technology sector is being overlooked.

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Madhumita Murgia
So, John, in this season of the podcast, we’ve been looking at quantum computers and the impact they might have. But quantum sensors, there’s another type of quantum technology that’s being developed, and it seems to be revolutionary in its own right, at least in the world of brain scans and neurological research like we’ve just heard. So we should probably take a step back here and talk about what quantum sensors are, how they work and why they might be so useful.

John Thornhill
I mean, I think Matt has a very good point that quantum sensors tend to be the overlooked sibling of quantum computing, which gets all the headlines. But quantum sensors clearly have a lot of potential, and they might become more practically useful before quantum computers themselves. And quantum sensors work in different ways. But essentially what they’re doing is taking advantage of the fact that quantum particles are really sensitive to their environment. And you’ll remember when we we’re talking about building quantum computers, that was one of the real big problems for quantum computers, that they are sensitive to all kinds of environmental noise.

Madhumita Murgia
That’s right. And this is a problem because an even a little bit of heat or electromagnetic waves or photons of light, really anything in the environment is enough to disturb the delicate state of the qubits and to stop the computer working at all.

John Thornhill
I’d say quantum sensors are really trying to turn that weakness into a strength. They’re using the fact that quantum particles are super sensitive to changes in the environment around them, but that allows you to measure the environment with an incredible level of sensitivity and accuracy. So in the case of quantum brain scanners, they’re measuring the tiny changes in the brain’s electromagnetic fields to tell you about what’s going on in the brain. But quantum particles can be sensitive to all kinds of other small environmental changes, too. So they have lots of other potential uses.

Madhumita Murgia
So what kind of applications are we talking about here?

John Thornhill
Well, you can build better guidance systems with quantum particles, for example, that are sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field. Another really interesting use is for quantum sensors that detect tiny changes in gravity, because this can tell you a lot about movements in the Earth deep underground. And we spoke to one big fan of quantum sensors and in particular, these gravity detecting sensors. His name is Stuart Woods.

Stuart Woods
Being able to use these atoms to look at the rest of the world and to see how the world is changing is really the next generation of sensors. And that’s what we’re talking about with quantum sensors.

John Thornhill
Stuart has a long career in different types of deep tech, including quantum computing, but he now works for a quantum technology investment company called Quantum Exponential. He says the really exciting thing about quantum sensors is they could give us unprecedented amounts of information about the world we live in. And this could help us tackle the major challenges we face today.

Stuart Woods
As we’re facing climate change, it is all about understanding the rate of change that, that is happening so that we can a, on one hand, look at what we can do to fix it. But I think as we all know, we’re constantly at a point with climate change to understand and express the urgency of the situation that we’re in. And I think quantum sensors will help us do that.

John Thornhill
Quantum sensors could help us better measure how and how fast our planet is changing. And this is where, Stuart says, detecting movements in the Earth is really important because shifting weather patterns are causing big changes in the ground as well as in the atmosphere. And those changes in the ground are producing tiny alterations in gravity that only quantum sensors can pick up.

Stuart Woods
You can imagine now where we can actually look underground and see changes in the Earth, eg, you know, subsidence. When you look at climate change, we obviously have floods, right? But the other side that we have with climate change is subsidence, right? Exactly the kind of applications you can see with quantum sensors. You know, in those situations you can imagine a large amount of mass physically changing and therefore slight changes in the gravitational field in those areas where you suspect that they might happen. And you can imagine over time, if we’re starting to monitor different areas, we should be able to start to get a very accurate understanding of subsidence and changes in the world.

John Thornhill
You can imagine other uses for gravity detecting quantum sensors, such as helping seismologists understand and predict earthquakes, and helping archaeologists investigate buried ruins without excavating them. But Stewart says they also have potential commercial uses with things like big infrastructure projects.

Stuart Woods
To me, I find railroads incredibly fascinating, right? A railroad is a living thing, right? In the winter, you might have a wet track, you might have the wet soil. Things sink. Things move. In the summer, everything dries out. The, the metal tracks themselves expand, and that infrastructure is now moving and contracting according to the environment that it sits in. And if we had the ability to understand how that track, you know, moved and changed, that would then allow us to build much larger infrastructures, but allow us to have a lot more intelligent infrastructures and therefore lead to mega smart infrastructures.

John Thornhill
So the picture that the champions of quantum sensor technology paint of the future is a world where we have access to much more information about all kinds of things around us, all kinds of information, and in much more detail than we’ve ever had before. And it’s the access to all that information from quantum sensors that could be really game changing for industries and society as a whole.

Madhumita Murgia
So this season we’ve been asking if a quantum revolution is coming. And with quantum computers, I suppose it’s easy to see how a computer suddenly showing up that can break the internet or solve these seemingly impossible problems could be seen as revolutionary. But maybe we should be thinking about the impact of quantum technologies more broadly.

John Thornhill
Yes, I think when it comes to quantum computers, even their strongest advocates admit there are a lot of technological challenges to building them. And maybe, other technologies using quantum physics should be getting a bit more attention. And earlier in the season, if you remember, we spoke to Jack Hidary, and he used to work for Google, and now he’s in charge of a quantum company called SandboxAQ.

Jack Hidary
Most of the attention is focused on computing, whereas quantum sensors will have impacts far sooner than quantum computers. In fact, we today have quantum sensors right now being tested in a variety of life sciences applications, medical applications, navigation applications. So these are the kinds of quantum sensing applications that are much more near-term. We don’t need error correction. We don’t need to build millions of qubits inside these things. We’re already fabricating these today and deploying them. So, so quantum sensing, I think, is an example where we’re going to see quantum technology in people’s hands in the next few years, far sooner than we’ll see a quantum computer.

John Thornhill
But we don’t have to choose which type of quantum technology to back. When we spoke, Jack painted a vision of a quantum future that is quite striking. You have quantum computers doing all these calculations. You have quantum sensors bringing in all this new data. And then you have a third component, a quantum communication network, a new kind of internet that could connect all of this together.

Jack Hidary
It’s really about ultimately having a parallel internet for the purpose of connecting two quantum computers, for the purpose of sharing a computation, for the purpose of taking a quantum sensor. You can directly connect it with a quantum computer for processing that data coming from the quantum sensor. So the future, now this is now 10 to 20 years from now, but just to paint a picture for your listeners, this is something that will occur over the next 10-20 years. It’s exciting for discovery. It’s exciting for collaboration. We’ll see that built out. And hopefully you and I will come back 10 years from now in another podcast, and we’ll see how we’re doing there.

John Thornhill
That’s the vision of the quantum future that people working in quantum technology today are talking about. So it’s not just about quantum computers. It’s about a whole ecosystem of quantum technologies all working together.

Madhumita Murgia
In the next and final episode of this Season of Tech Tonic, we go back into the weird world of quantum mechanics.

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Carlo Rovelli
Everything is quantum. So this cup I have in my hands, which looks so solid and well-defined, is actually a wavy thing that is constantly disappearing, reappearing and in principle could be in two places at the same time. And all these things in principle could happen.

Madhumita Murgia
We speak to some of the big names in the world of quantum mechanics about what quantum technology could tell us about the nature of the universe and reality.

David Deutsch
Supposing that you build a quantum computer - that means that there’s more to reality, exponentially more to reality, than just the states of the world that we see around us.

John Thornhill
This has been Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m John Thornhill.

Madhumita Murgia
And I’m Madhumita Murgia. Tech Tonic senior producer is Edwin Lane, and our producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon. Manuela Saragosa is our executive producer. Sound Design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Cheryl Brumley is our global head of audio.