“There are very easy solutions that don’t cost anything for those who want to play it safe.Brain Structure & Function offers free color in print and online for all its papers! “In my case, I don’t like my brain to be stimulated by anything that is not physiological,” Volkow told Science News. You can have short and sweet conversations, use a speakerphone or keep the phone away from your head. Bioengineers bring together ideas from engineering and biology.įor those who don’t want to wait to find out for sure whether cell phones are bad for the brain, there are ways to talk more safely. He wrote an article about the study for a journal, but he did not work on the new study. Lai is a bioengineer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Holding a cell phone to your ear during a conversation is “not really safe,” Lai told Science News. All of these changes make it difficult to collect evidence about any health risks of cell phones, since exposure to radiation can vary.īut Henry Lai, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, is uncomfortable with the data emerging on cell phones. They release different amounts of radiation depending on whether a person is talking or listening, the type of phone, the number of people using phones nearby, and the distance to the nearest cell phone tower. That activity, the scientists say, was probably triggered by radiation from the phone.Ĭell phones do not always emit the same amount of energy. This suggests that the brain cells there were active ― even without the person hearing anything.
These right-side brain cells were using almost as much glucose as the brain uses when a person is talking. The right side of the brain, however, had used more glucose, which is a type of sugar that provides fuel to brain cells. The PET scan showed that the left side (the side with the phone turned off) of each participant’s brain hadn’t changed from the way it was before the experiment. By studying those patterns, the scientists can see what’s happening inside the body. There, the radiation acts like light: it’s absorbed in some places, passed on in others, and reflected in others. That chemical goes to the part of the body that the scientists want to study. It’s like the opposite of an X-Ray: A person is injected with a chemical that produces radiation. After 50 minutes with two phones strapped to their heads, the participants were given PET scans.Ī PET scan is a way to see what’s going on inside the body. With this set-up, the scientists could be sure they were studying brain activity from the phone itself, and not brain activity due to listening and talking during a conversation. The phone on the right ear played a message for 50 minutes, but the participants couldn’t hear it because the sound was off. Each one had two Samsung cell phones strapped to his or her head - one on each ear. The 47 participants in the experiment may have looked a little strange. So it affects the body, but not by being radioactive. All of these kinds of radiation are energy, but cell phone radiation is not radioactive. The radiation emitted by a cell phone is different from the types in X-rays and nuclear power plants.
Volkow, who worked on a study that found the connection with brain activity, is a researcher and doctor at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md. “The human brain is sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that is emitted from cell phones,” Nora Volkow told Science News.
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