I have a website that holds more formal details of my work. Most relevant to Noise, it has a box that is linked to my 'tweets'. Occasionally I put cool links on there. Check it out

On twitter I am known as 'GuyBillings'.

Last year you may remember that LHC, an enourmous European particle physics experiment, went live. The aim of the experiment is to try and find out why matter is heavy. One of our very own noisemakers - Tom - works at CERN on this very experiment. Unfortunately the particle accelerator that is needed to run the experiment was damaged due to a manufacturing defect in one of its magnets and is currently the worlds largest, heaviest and most deeply buried paperweight. We will have to wait until after the spring when it will be fixed before we find out what happens next. In the meantime you can try an experiment at home that I demonstrated on Radio 4 just after LHC went live....

This experiment investigates the interaction of light with matter and illustrates the presence of technology used at CERN in our everyday lives.

You will need:

1 Remote controller for a home appliance such as a TV
2 A large glass dish or bowl or some clear drinking glasses, filled with water.
3 A digital camera

Experiment 1

Look in to the end of the remote control and press a button. You should see no light coming out.

Now point the remote control at the digital camera so that you can see the end of the remote control on the camera screen . Press the button again. You should see a blue light blinking on and off on the end of the remote control. 

Experiment 2

Now place the glass dish or drinking glass in between the remote and the camera and repeat the experiment. You should notice that the blue light coming from the remote is dimmer. If you have enough water it might even disappear. You can experiment with different amounts of water in between the camera and the remote control.

What is going on?

Our eyes detect light due to its interaction with pigment in the rod and cone cells of the retina. This pigment only responds to light within a certain range of wavelength and we perceive this as colour. 

The remote control emits ‘near infra red’ light that has a wavelength that is slightly longer than visible red light. The pigment in our eyes cannot detect light of this wavelength. 

However the camera uses a different material, silicon, to detect the light. The response of silicon to light is different to the response of our eyes and so the camera can detect the light.

Water absorbs longer wavelength (red) light well, but light in the rest of the visible spectrum badly. This is why water is clear, but looks slightly blue. The water is able to remove some red from visible light. Infra red light is absorbed even more effectively by water (around 10-100 times better than typical visible light). For this reason the water can dim the remote control light.

What does this have to do with particle physics and CERN?

Light can be thought of as being made up of tiny particles called photons. The energy of the particles depends on the wavelength (or colour) of the light. The energy of the photons determines how they interact with matter. So the reason that the camera can see the infrared but your eyes cannot is due to the fact that the materials used in the detectors (eyes or camera) absorb photons differently.

The device in your camera, a charge coupled device (CCD) uses a principle that is used in particle detectors at CERN. The principle is that particles can be detected when they pass though silicon because they release a small electric charge from the silicon.

So in this experiment particles (photons) were produced and fired at a particle detector (the camera) which uses a principle used in particle physics experiments. 

Some time ago I was asked to answer some questions by a journalist. He wanted to know the neuroscientific angle on happiness. Like conciousness, happiness is not something that neuroscience really understands and is not something that one can easily 'sum-up' in a scientific way. Nonetheless I gave it a go and had fun writing it.

I have not actually seen the article he wrote myself, but friends have told me that he referred to me as 'An eminent neuroscientist'. For the record: I am certainly not an eminent neuroscientist! If my name were followed by the letters 'FRS' (Fellow of the Royal Society), or perhaps if my name were prefixed by 'Professor' then I could make such a claim. The truth is that I am a Postdoctoral Researcher which is very much the first rung of the ladder. I am not even officially an 'academic', since I do not hold a university post. So the words: 'An eminent neuroscientist' were very embarrassing indeed, especially so because in professional research people are usually deliberately candid and modest. 

Luckily, the publication in question is probably not one that is read by many neuroscientists, so it probably wont harm me too much. But I did learn a valuable lesson: Approach journalists with caution!

Below are my replies to his questions:

1)       What happens in the brain when we’re happy?

Usually some event or events in the outside world make us happy. For example we might witness the birth of our first child. On a more everyday level, we might have a particularly good day at work, feeling a sense of belonging and success. In these cases incoming sensory information is processed by the brain and is deemed to be something worth being happy about. There may be areas of the brain that specialise in the task of deciding whether or not these events should make us happy. The area of brain at the front of your skull, known as the frontal cortex has been shown to carry out this kind of function. The frontal cortex has been shown to process the emotional appearance of faces and to respond in reward situations. Interestingly there is a left-brain right-brain effect here. Researchers have observed that people with very active left frontal cortex tend to be more 'happy go lucky' while a more active right cortex correlates with a person who is more pessimistic. There is also a difference of this sort in stroke patients. People who have strokes in the right hemisphere of their brains, thus leaving the left hemisphere in control, tend to be far more positive about their very serious predicament. On the other hand, patients with strokes on the left side of their brains, where the right hemisphere remains in control, are far less cheery about their health.

Once the brain has determined that events have occurred in the outside world that we should be happy about, it leads to an adjustment in our brain chemistry. Neuromodulators are chemicals in the brain that have widespread effect on almost every aspect of brain function, for example sleep, memory or mood. There are neuromodulators that are associated with feelings of happiness. Dopamine is a neuromodulator that is associated with reward. Rewards occur when we aim to do something and our actions are successful in leading to that goal. Dopamine is released when we get that 'kick' out of achieving an important aim. Another important neuromodulator associated with happiness is Serotonin. Deficits in serotonin are associated with depression. One type of antidepressants, known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) increase the level of Serotonin in the brain and can lead to relief of depression. Finally, 'endorphins' or intrinsic opioids are closely associated with whether or not an experience seems pleasurable or painful. 

The chemical dimension to happiness in the brain explains why we can provoke 'happiness'  even when there is nothing to be happy about. Recreational drugs affect the systems of neuromodualtion in the brain. Cocaine leads to a high by flooding the brain with dopamine. Ecstasy generates feelings of empathy and belonging by flooding the brain with serotonin. Heroin makes almost anything seem divinely pleasurable by causing the release of massive amounts of intrinsic opioids. However these drugs can be very dangerous because artificially raising the levels of neuromodulation in the brain has many effects other than simply altering mood. 

2)       What methods do you use to monitor it?

There is no simple direct way of monitoring happiness, other than to ask for subjective feelings. Scientific studies of happiness and mood tend to place people in situations with specific emotional content and then measure the responses of the brain. For example to test how the brain processes emotion in others, subjects might be placed in a brain scanner and then shown pictures of happy or sad faces. The activity in each area of the brain can be recorded in these situations and correlated with the subjective reports of the subject. 

Much of what we know is derived from doctors treating patients with brain damage. Sometimes damage to a particular area of the brain leads to a particular and persistent modification to the patient's mood or behavior. In this case we know that damage to that area is correlated with a certain emotional outcome.

3)       Can you quantify levels of happiness?

Again, there is no universally accepted quantification of happiness. This might be for two reasons: Firstly, from a neurological perspective happiness is a complex thing. The generation of happiness in the brain is the result of the interaction between many systems in the brain. Secondly, there is a significant subjective element to what it is to be happy.

4)       What things make us happy?

That is an almost ludicrously large question! There is a biological answer: That what makes us happy is the satisfaction of goals that are required to continue our existence and lead to reproduction. Evolutionary psychologists might argue that the pleasure-pain systems of our brain have evolved to propel us in the direction of these biological aims. Thus, eating, mating, bringing home the means of sustenance, and tending to our children all make us happy in this viewpoint.

However there is more to it than this. Firstly people often do things that do not obviously further their strict biological aims, but that nevertheless make them happy. For example monks and nuns forego all hopes of satisfying some of the most evolutionarily important biological urges for the sake of abstract principles. Secondly, the list of biological aims seems to be necessary but perhaps not sufficient for happiness. That is to say that plenty of people have all of their biological aims met with guaranteed food, guaranteed shelter and guaranteed reproduction and yet they are still far from happy. 

Personally I think that our brains have become so adapted to culture, the aspect of humanity that makes us stand apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, that it is possible for culture to override biology. Our capacity to learn is so great that it can override and surpass our biology. We are capable of learning to see the worth of things independently of their direct consequences for our own reproduction. Likewise we can learn to be in conflict with our own drives and emotions, leading to unhappiness or mental illness. 

If your biological aims are satisfied to your own liking, then the following might help to make you more happy: 

Take regular exercise: this has been shown to readjust your brain chemistry in a favorable way, it reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol while increasing levels of seratonin and endorphins.

Dont take things too seriously: Like the best existentialists, try to hold on to the arbitrariness of our own social constructions and remember that we are all apes flying though space on a comparatively tiny rock. Then laugh. 

Avoid secrets and duplicity: By holding deep dark secrets you set your self up for internal and external conflict. Even if it seems painful, truthfulness is often better in the long run.

Dont be too obsessed with your past or your future: By lying awake at night analysing that stressful meeting, or making financial projections into the future, you simply stress yourself out. Worse, you stress yourself out in a way where there can be no possible 'reward' and no relief. Have a coco instead and think about the apes... Try to live in the moment.

5)       Is there anything I, personally, can do to measure my level of happiness?

Your own subjectivity is the best measure. 

Over the past couple of weeks it has been all change. I have started my new job at UCL and, of course, I have have become a Noisemaker. Recently I attended the first Noisemaker gathering in which we had a great laugh demonstrating 'try this at home' experiments. Soon these will be on the website for you to see, so I will not go in to more detail. Suffice to say that the experiments make heavy use of the important scientific ingredients of water, eggs and matches.

At work I have been getting to grips with parallel computing, otherwise described as 'running programs on more than one processor at once'.  The processor, or CPU, is the part of the computer that carries out all of the operations that make the program work.  When you play a computer game or use a web browser, the program that you are interacting with is usually using only one CPU. With the advent of 'multicore' processors, it is not unusual for home computers to have more than one CPU. But unless the software you run is specially made, it will still only ever use one of the CPUs at a time.

An exception to this are games consoles such as the new Xbox and the Play station 3, which have more than one processor. The games that run on these computers have been specially programmed so that they can make more than one CPU work at a time. For example in a shooting game,  a simple way of doing this might be to have one CPU calculating where all of the gun shots are going and another CPU calculating how the enemies in the game are reacting. Although this gives a faster game,  it makes the task of programming the games more complicated, because the programmer has to figure out how to give tasks to each processor simultaneously within one program.

I have not been programming games, but myself and my colleagues have been working on parallel brain simulations. In the simulations there are many individual cells. You can see the cells in the picture above, they are the coloured spheres. In the picure, different kinds of cells are shown in different colours. The simulated cells are brain cells, or neurons, and can generate patterns of electrical activity. In the model the neurons are connected together and when we run the simulation we can calculate the activity of the neurons and see how the connections between them change their activity.  The picture shows our model of a small section of a brain region called the cerebellum, which is at the back of your skull underneath your brain. The cerebellum is important for the coordination of movement. We are running these simulations to try and understand how the neurons generate patterns of activity that allow them to perform their coordinating role.
 
Because the simulations require many calculations to  be performed, I have been learning how set programs up so that I can make more than one CPU work for me at once. In the brain model, this means that different cells are simulated by separate CPUs. This speeds up the simulation time, which is essential in biologically realistic simulations, where it can take days or weeks for the programs to run. Eventually these simulations will be distributed across a network of many separate computers so that tens or even hundreds of CPUs can be used at once. This will allow us to simulate bigger bits of brain.