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

Madhumita MurgiaHi, my name is Madhumita Murgia, and Im one of the presenters of Tech Tonic. Were 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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So far in this season of Tech Tonic, weve been talking about quantum computers and how they could bring about a quantum revolution. But computers arent the only forms of technology being built today that use quantum physics.

Margot TaylorOK. So all right. Do you want to come in? This is our little participant today. Shes a little shy.

Madhumita MurgiaIn 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. Shes quiet and shy, and shes holding tight to her dads hand as Margot gets her set up in her lab.

Margot TaylorShes 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. Its 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. Its a quantum brain scanner fitted with a raft of sensors that use quantum physics to detect brain activity.

Margot TaylorOK. Are you ready? Are you ready to go? All right (door shutting sound). So the doors 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 TaylorAnd 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 brains billions of firing neurons.

Margot TaylorSo this is our stimulus computer, and its just the operating panel on the, on the right, and on the left, we have the ongoing activity coming from these sensors.

Madhumita MurgiaIt means Margot can watch the little girls brain working in real time right there on her computer screen. Margot has spent her career trying to understand childrens brains, but until now, its been virtually impossible to get an accurate picture of whats going on inside them because the brain scanners in general use today dont 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 theyre giving researchers like Margot a window into the workings of young brains that theyve never had before. Margot says this new quantum technology feels like a miracle.

Margot Taylor This is the first time weve 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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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

John Thornhill And Im John Thornhill. In this season, weve been asking if were 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, were looking beyond the computers and asking if the wider world of quantum technology is where the quantum revolution is really taking place.

Madhumita MurgiaMargot Taylors 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 shes doing right now focuses on autism, a condition that emerges in childhood. So in her lab, shes scanning childrens 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 MurgiaDespite decades of research, theres still a lot we dont know about autism and what causes it. We know it develops in childhood and that theres 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 TaylorSo were looking for a brain signature that could predict the likelihood of developing autism.

Madhumita Murgia If shes 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 TaylorAnd if thats 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 Margots research could be groundbreaking. Thats because until now, researchers havent been able to look for the brain signature for autism in young children. In fact, they havent been able to observe the brain functioning of young children much at all. Thats because existing brain scanners dont really work on kids. Theyre too big, and crucially to work, they need the person being scanned to do something that children find really hard to do.

Margot TaylorThe participant has to stay perfectly still and little children dont 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 its quite a ways away from the persons 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, thered 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 childrens brains was basically impossible. And for people like Margot, whos particularly interested in childrens 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 Im a professor of physics at the University of Nottingham, and Ive 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 BrookesIn recent years, theres 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. Theyre about the size of a Lego brick. The device looks like a bike helmet. Its 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 its 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 thats not just children. Measuring brain function in patients with Parkinsons, for example, or studying the brain when seizures happen in epilepsy. But for researchers like Margot, it means theyre getting their first real insight into something theyve spent their whole career studying from a distance, the brains of young children.

Margot TaylorIt is very, very exciting. Oh, we thought it was a miracle (laughs). We hadnt seen really good recordings of ongoing brain function in little children before. So for me, this is just a tremendous breakthrough.

Madhumita MurgiaLike 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 arent just used for scanning brains. Theyre being developed for all kinds of uses to measure changes deep on the ground, making better navigation systems, driverless cars, in building the worlds most accurate clocks. And Matt Brookes says that unlike quantum computing, you dont have to look years or decades into the future to see the applications for quantum sensors. They are being used today.

Matthew BrookesA lot of people, when they think about quantum technology, they immediately think of quantum computing, which is interesting, is exciting, but its 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 theres certainly a hype around quantum computing, and its sometimes frustrating that because of that hype, actually a lot of the other work thats being done in the quantum technology sector is being overlooked.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Madhumita Murgia So, John, in this season of the podcast, weve been looking at quantum computers and the impact they might have. But quantum sensors, theres another type of quantum technology thats being developed, and it seems to be revolutionary in its own right, at least in the world of brain scans and neurological research like weve 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 theyre doing is taking advantage of the fact that quantum particles are really sensitive to their environment. And youll remember when we were 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 MurgiaThats 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 Id say quantum sensors are really trying to turn that weakness into a strength. Theyre 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, theyre measuring the tiny changes in the brains electromagnetic fields to tell you about whats 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 MurgiaSo what kind of applications are we talking about here?

John ThornhillWell, you can build better guidance systems with quantum particles, for example, that are sensitive to the Earths 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 WoodsBeing 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 thats what were 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 WoodsAs were 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, were constantly at a point with climate change to understand and express the urgency of the situation that were 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 WoodsYou 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 were 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 WoodsTo 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 weve ever had before. And its the access to all that information from quantum sensors that could be really game changing for industries and society as a whole.

Madhumita MurgiaSo this season weve been asking if a quantum revolution is coming. And with quantum computers, I suppose its 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 hes in charge of a quantum company called SandboxAQ.

Jack HidaryMost 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 dont need error correction. We dont need to build millions of qubits inside these things. Were already fabricating these today and deploying them. So, so quantum sensing, I think, is an example where were going to see quantum technology in peoples hands in the next few years, far sooner than well see a quantum computer.

John Thornhill But we dont 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 Its 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. Its exciting for discovery. Its exciting for collaboration. Well see that built out. And hopefully you and I will come back 10 years from now in another podcast, and well see how were doing there.

John Thornhill Thats the vision of the quantum future that people working in quantum technology today are talking about. So its not just about quantum computers. Its about a whole ecosystem of quantum technologies all working together.

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

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Carlo RovelliEverything is quantum. So thiscup Ihave 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 twoplaces at thesame time. And all these things in principle could happen.

Madhumita MurgiaWe 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 DeutschSupposing that you build a quantum computer - that means that theres 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. Im John Thornhill.

Madhumita MurgiaAnd Im Madhumita Murgia. Tech Tonic senior producer is Edwin Lane, and our producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon. Manuela Saragosa is our executive producer. Sound Design byBreen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Cheryl Brumley is our global head of audio.

Read the original:

The quantum revolution: brain waves - Financial Times