NASA Mind-Reading Research

Narrator: Scientists at NASA’s Glenn Research Center are learning how to monitor airline pilots’ brain activity to determine when they are operating under dangerous levels of stress, fatigue and distraction. Their goal is to improve safety on commercial airplanes by helping pilots make better decisions. The team is testing a helmet that uses optical sensors to peer into the brain and detect changes in the blood flow that indicate a pilot’s mental state. Angela Harrivel: We’re monitoring the blood flow in the brain in different regions. And by using that data we can determine what cognitive state the pilot is in. And that’s done through an emerging technology called functional near infrared spectroscopy, and that injects light into the brain which then diffuses right through the skin, the skull, the fluid, through the top layer of the brain. We detect it a few centimeters away and we look for changes in the blood flow right in those various locations. Narrator: Fifteen NASA employees and contractors have volunteered to wear the helmet while sitting in a moving cockpit simulator. The test subjects are presented with a variety of distractions and stressful conditions as they fly a virtual airplane. Angela Harrivel: We’re trying to measure the response of the subjects to different functional tasks, whether those be simple, pure tasks or complicated multitasks. So by monitoring the subject’s response to these simple and more complicated tasks, we can get an idea of how they …
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