美国国家公共电台 NPR Brain Patterns May Predict People At Risk Of Suicide

 

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We're going to hear now about some new research that could help mental health professionals identify people who are likely to attempt suicide. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on an effort to assess young adults by studying their brains.

JON HAMILTON, BYLINE¹: Lisa Pan is a psychiatrist² at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in treating young people who are suicidal. Pan says she recalls when one of her patients showed up at her office saying he felt bad.

LISA PAN: He had come with a backpack, which is unlike him. And he had decided³ when he came to my office that if I didn't determine that he was at acute risk, he was going to take the backpack full of rocks and jump off a bridge.

HAMILTON: Pan made the right call. She put him in a hospital. But she says that sort of decision is often no more than an educated guess.

PAN: We're very bad at identifying which people who are presenting with risk are, in fact, going to go on and have a suicide attempt.

HAMILTON: So Pan and her colleagues started working with some researchers a mile away at Carnegie Mellon University. A psychologist named Marcel Just was using a technology called functional⁴ MRI to study what people were thinking. He'd shown that thoughts create a distinctive⁵ pattern of activity in the brain. He'd also shown that a computer program could learn to read the neural⁶ signatures of specific words, ideas and more.

MARCEL JUST: We could tell what emotion a person was feeling. We could tell what social interaction they're thinking about. And we thought, well, maybe the brain activation⁷ patterns of certain thoughts are altered in people who are thinking about suicide.

HAMILTON: So Just, Pan and a team of researchers chose a list of words they thought might reveal brain activation patterns associated with suicide.

JUST: Some are kind of obvious suicide-related words like apathy⁸, death, desperate, fatal, funeral.

HAMILTON: Then the team had several dozen volunteers lie in a brain scanner and watch a computer screen.

JUST: The words come up on the screen one at a time. They think about them for three seconds each. And we capture the brain activity while they're thinking about what each of these concepts means.

HAMILTON: And Just says a computer soon learned how to tell which brains belong to a person who was suicidal.

JUST: It correctly identified 15 of the 17 suicidal participants and 16 of the 17 controls.

HAMILTON: What's more, the computer was very good at telling whether a person had only thought about suicide or actually made an attempt. Barry Horwitz, a brain imaging expert at the National Institutes of Health, says the results need to be confirmed by a larger study. But he says the research hints at a future in which brain scans and computers can help assess a person's mental health.

BARRY HORWITZ: Just looking at the behavior is probably inadequate⁹ for a lot of purposes. And it's much better to be able to see what the brain is doing.

HAMILTON: The new research appears in the journal Nature Human Behavior. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.

1 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

2 psychiatrist   

n.精神病专家；精神病医师

参考例句：

• He went to a psychiatrist about his compulsive gambling.他去看精神科医生治疗不能自拔的赌瘾。
• The psychiatrist corrected him gently.精神病医师彬彬有礼地纠正他。

3 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

4 functional   

adj.为实用而设计的，具备功能的，起作用的

参考例句：

• The telephone was out of order,but is functional now.电话刚才坏了，但现在可以用了。
• The furniture is not fancy,just functional.这些家具不是摆着好看的，只是为了实用。

5 distinctive   

adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的

参考例句：

• She has a very distinctive way of walking.她走路的样子与别人很不相同。
• This bird has several distinctive features.这个鸟具有几种突出的特征。

6 neural   

adj.神经的，神经系统的

参考例句：

• The neural network can preferably solve the non- linear problem.利用神经网络建模可以较好地解决非线性问题。
• The information transmission in neural system depends on neurotransmitters.信息传递的神经途径有赖于神经递质。

7 activation   

n. 激活，催化作用

参考例句：

• A computer controls the activation of an air bag.电脑控制着气囊的启动。

8 apathy   

n.漠不关心，无动于衷；冷淡

参考例句：

• He was sunk in apathy after his failure.他失败后心恢意冷。
• She heard the story with apathy.她听了这个故事无动于衷。

9 inadequate   

adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的

参考例句：

• The supply is inadequate to meet the demand.供不应求。
• She was inadequate to the demands that were made on her.她还无力满足对她提出的各项要求。