Cell Phone Radiation Excites the Brain

frostilicus2 writes "The Register is reporting that Italian researchers have shown that radiation from mobile phones can excite the brain's cortex. A region that is "responsible for many higher faculties". They even claim that such an effect could be beneficial to some conditions."

Comments

Great!

[Ohreally_factor]

This should be a boon for the phone sex industry.

Ummm

[suso]

They even claim that such an effect could be beneficial to some conditions.

Counterpoint, so does that mean that in other conditions it is harmful. Like causing you to drive like a moron.

Re:Ummm

[thebdj]

Counterpoint, so does that mean that in other conditions it is harmful. Like causing you to drive like a moron.

You know, studies have actually been mixed in regards to this. Mythbusters even attempted to replicate a study that was performed; however, I was a bit skeptical of their approach since it relied on asking questions during the cell phone section that would require some degree of actual thinking and/or decision making. Most conversations I have had on a cell phone, even those not done while driving, have hardly required much thought. The calls I typically make are fairly normal conversation with either my mother or one of my friends.

I believe that my driving is no worse with the cell phone since I drive one handed anyway, and I believe that for most phone conversations the drivers are no worse then those who are smoking, playing with the radio, or eating while they drive. In fact, I would not be surprised to find people are as poor at driving with a hands-free set for their phone as they are holding the phone. In reality, I think the worse distractions do not come from the phone, but from people who may be in the car. I cannot count the number of times I see the person driving take their eyes of the road in front of them to look at the wife, girlfriend, son/daughter, or other individual riding in the car with them. Maybe it is just me, but this is far more dangerous then having a conversation and keeping your eyes on the road.

Re:Ummm

[mrogers]

My guess is that it's the brain, not the hands, that makes you more likely to have an accident while talking on the phone. When I'm on the phone, especially during a long call, I tend to notice a change in my spatial awareness: I become less aware of the space around me, and more aware of the space around the person I'm talking to, particularly if they're in a place with a lot of background noise or a place I can easily visualise.

Good spatial awareness is essential for safe driving, and as you pointed out a lot of people drive with one hand anyway, so I wouldn't be surprised if the accident rate was equally high for people using hands-free phones. You could test this theory in a driving simulator by asking one group of subjects to perform a spatial awareness task (eg matching rotated shapes) and a second group to perform a verbal task (eg listening comprehension).

Re:Ummm

[wbean]

I live in the city and spend a lot of time walking around. I have reached the point where if I see a driver on a cell phone I assume that they will not see me and I stay well out of their way. They are in a little world of their own with very little awareness of what's around them.

The NY Times had an interesting article on this recently (Times Select subscription required). Researchers put video cameras in cars and collected information about what was going on in the car in the seconds before an accident. The result was that "driver inattention was the overwhelming cause of the crashes in the study."

My own opinion is that conversations inside the car are less distracting than cell phone conversations because the second party to the converstation is aware of the situation outside the car and knows when to shut up or to wait for an answer. The person on the other end of the cell phone conversation doesn't have this extra input and so the conversation doesn't have the natural breaks for heavy traffic that an in-car converstation would have.

Where's the control group?

[quokkapox]

Talking on the cell phone will activate your cortex. Ok. So where's the control group that talked on a wired phone instead and showed a lower level of cortical activity?

Sounds like a report designed to secure more $

[DavidBorgioli]

It is an interesting article but way too short to tell us anything. With just 15 subjects the sample group is likely way too small to draw any conclusions. It may be enough however to secure more research money.

doesn't seem scientifically valid

[Anonymous Coward]

Without having read the actual scientific journal article (but just the very unscientific coverage of it), I have serious reservations about the study: 1) Cell phone radiation is of sufficiently low energy that I am not sure it can even penetrate INTO the brain. I am not sure this has ever been conclusively shown. (I am a radiation oncologist by trade. We deal with much higher energy beams when treating patients. So I'm a little outside my training here. However, even some of the treatments we use only penetrate a centimeter or less, and these are much higher energy than radiation from cell phones, as far as I know.) 2) This study appears, at first blush, to make the error of assuming that association of two disparate events demonstrates cause and effect. If the brain is more active, their study design fails to prove that it is due to the radiation. Maybe the brain becomes more excitable because the study subject just got a phone call from a friend or loved one? Furthermore, does the motor cortex excitation show a "sidedness?" That is, if subject hold the phone against her right ear, versus their left, does it make a difference in the excitation of the right versus left motor cortex? It might be that the original article addresses some of these shortcomings.

Re:doesn't seem scientifically valid

[RocketRainbow]

No, microwaves can penetrate the brain with very little trouble at all. It's basically transparent to them, but every now and then a microwave will be absorbed by a molecule and heat it a little.

And then your brain cools itself back down the same way it would if it were a hot day outside.

Obviously it's theoretically possible that a lot of microwave photons could cause a lot of damage by heating the brain to the point where chemical change occurs. Your brain can cool itself quite comfortably if the hotspots don't heat up at a rate any more than 1K per hour - I've never actually heard of anyone checking that this is so, but I would expect that this was part of the initial safety testing when cell phones were first introduced.

(Note that microwaves haven't enough energy to ionise the brain like your gamma or X rays do - they work by heating molecules rather than by ripping the electrons off an atom to change the chemical structure.)