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>> don't miss any updates from washington journal. start your twitter account today at twutter.com -- twitter.com/c-span wj. >> this week on "the communicators," several bear spectives on a study that measures how brain activity changes due to cell phone use. >> host: joining us on "the communicators" is dr. nora volkow who is the director of the national institute on drug abuse, and recently dr. volkow, you conducted a study on cell phones. what was that study? >> guest: the study was to try to find out the human brain is sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that is emitted by cell phones which is not an obvious answer because this is a very low intensity. and prior studies that have been done to address that question have provided very inconclusive results. some show increases in activity, some show decreases, some show

no changes, so very difficult to extract information that could answer that question, is the human brain sensitive to the intensities of electromagnetic radiation that are deposited in your brain when you're using a cell phone just for regular communications. >> host: so if that was the question you were looking to answer, what is the answer? is. >> guest: well, we found that after 50 minutes of exposure of a cell phone, the areas of the brain that were closest to the antenna showed increase consumption of glucose. now, glow cose is the way the brain extracts energy, so when you're activating an area of the brain, you see an increase in glucose consumption. an increase in activity of the areas of the brain that were close to the antenna. >> host: so what else would increase brain glucose? thinking, sports, etc. >> guest: yeah.

if you're alive, you're consuming glucose, and the only situation where you will see no consumption is in a dead brain. so, and i'm saying this very clearly because this is not like a pathological response, this is a physiological response in the way the brain requires to perform its functions. for example, if i look at you, the areas of my brain that are involved in visual processing, the light, those areas are consuming much more glucose that is -- than if, for example, i had my ears closed so no stimulus comes through. so that's a visual cortex. and is amount of glucose that would be consumed by the visual cortex on my brain is going to be dependent on the complexionty of the visual stimulus i have in front of me. so how much glue cows is -- glucose is likely to be created,

probably a lot. between 20-50%? so this is one of the areas that requires the most glucose consumption in performing a task. when i'm speaking, for example, the areas involved with language may be consuming 10-15% more glucose than if i were silent. so there's significant viability depending on the area of the brain that you're studying on the one hand, but also on the complexity of operation that you may be performing or the complexity of the stimulation that you're being exposed to. so what we observe when you have the cell phone like this, and by the way, the cell phone is muted. because, if there's noise, that would activate the cortex in terms of hearing. so it's transmitting text that has been recorded, but it's muted. so what you have here in terms of increasing metabolism which

is very close to the antenna in this area here, we are interpreting to reflect the electromagnetic radiation emitted from the antenna, and that increase was approximately 7%. >> host: 7%. >> guest: 7%. so it's in the low range, but it's in the physiological range. >> host: now, you have a slide here that you provided to us, and this is with the cell phone off a brain scan. >> guest: yeah. >> host: and this is the front of the brain, correct? the part up at the top. and then with the cell phone on. >> guest: yeah. >> host: and you see a lot more yellow in the front of the brain here. if you'd explain that. as well as you see a change in the red core. is there anything senate about that? >> guest: well, the colors just are used to scale the amount of glucose consumed, and this is a rainbow scale, so the red is the area that has the highest consumption. so as you compare one, the

images of the brain off versus the images of the brain on, it's actually this area of the brain, the axial plain like this, off the top of your eyes which is the area that has the closest relationship with the antenna. so those areas when you compare you see more red and more yellow which is an indication of the fact that glucose consumption is higher under those conditions. and you can, using these images, these are just visual display of numbers that are scaled in different colors. but you can draw regions of interest, extract a particular area in the frontal cortex, measure specifically the activity of glucose consumption and compare. and when you do that, that's when, on average, we're seeing a 7% increase in glucose utilization that you're visually observing as more reds than yellows. >> host: well, the question that

everybody is asking, dr. volkow, is, is this an indication of danger? when you're talking about the radio-- the electronic magnetic forces that are being emitted? >> guest: i wish i could answer that question because everybody has asked me, and i feel frustrated i can't. i would love to say our study is able to clarify this controversial issue of whether cell phones could be harmful to the brain, but the reality is that we cannot. what our study does tell us is that the human brain appears to be sense ty to these -- sensitive to these electromagnetic radiation that's emitted for cell phones. whether this is harmful or not, that is something that needs to be addressed by future studies. and it is important in many perspectives if, in fact, say -- and i say, not saying that it is, but studies were to show that there is long-lasting consequences, that could be

negative, then the question is how can you avoid them? and the it's very easy. you just don't put the cell phone by the side of your head. because the intensity of the current emit prd the cell phone -- emitted from the cell phone rapidly decreases with distance. so if i have my cell phone one foot away from me, the exposure of my brain is going to be minimal. so that's one. assuming that it shows that there's a negative effect. on the other hand, if it does not show that there are negative effects, as a scientist, obviously, i love the concept of could we start to apply this technology for therapeutic purposes? could one use, for example, this type of stimulation to activate areas of the brain where it may be beneficial? and, again, that is a scientific question that needs to be addressed provided that there's no evidence that there are harmful effects. whichever way the field shows,

whether there is or is not, i think it's extremely interesting to my brain that it is sensitive to these very weak electromagnetic currents. >> host: what are reemfs, and what other devices or how else do we receive them? >> guest: well, the electromagnetic radiation that you are getting from cell phones, you get a certain frequency and power that is distinct from other types of wireless technology. for example, your regular phone that is wireless but not the cell phone technology has much less power than a regular cell phone. and the thesis which with i work estimated it to be approximately 100 less powerful. so that is, so you need to consider that intensity, the power of your signal on the one hand. the other thing that is very relevant for physiological processes has to do with the

frequencies. and the way at which cell phones transmit is in the giga to low megahertz frequencies which is very, very different to devices that may be dependent on extremely low frequency waves. and which have been shown some of those to do effect electroenreceive lo graphic signals in the brain. so the frequency is very important. the other aspect of these radiations that have been shown by investigators to be relevant is the control of the amplitude which has a very slow frequency pattern. so, frankly, there are multiple factors and variables that determine, ultimately, the extent to which biological tissue may be or may not be sensitive to this exposure. so you cannot just equate one type of energy emitted by cell

phones, say another type of energy emitted by other devices including your laptop which requires wireless technology. >> so are emfs being emitted from from laptops as well? >> guest: well, there are electronic currents that are very, very, very weak, much weaker than anything on the cell phone from which, to my knowledge, there has been no concern with respect to health effects. >> host: now, can you compare the amount of radioactivity that we're receiving through a cell phone to an x-ray or to maybe an airport screening machine? >> guest: those are two different types of radiation. one is based on ionizing radiation that has very specific properties and for which there is clear-cut evidence that at a certain range it can be harmful and has been associated with cancer. and that's why there are very strict limits in terms of how much ionizing radiation you can expose your body.

and at the extreme -- like an atomic bomb -- we all know the adverse consequences with respect to markedly increasing the risk for cancer. so that's a very different type of radiation. but that radiation also interacts with biological tissues in a different way that electromagnetic radiation or radio frequencies. so they are very distinct. in the one case for ionizing radiation, no one questions that at high levels or at a certain threshold it does increase the risk for cancer. that is not necessarily the case for electromagnetic radiations provided that they are following the standard imposed by the regulatory agencies. and those standards, actually, are based very much on their threshold after which there should be no heating of the tissue. so the regulatory agencies are concerned that your cell phone does not emit energies that will

hit the tissue through microwave radiation. and my understanding is that all of the devices do follow very rigorously these strict regulations. >> host: dr. volkow, is your study the first of its kind, or have other studies been done like this, and if so, is your study consistent with the results of the other studies have shown? >> guest: there have been many studies to try to understand whether cell phone exposure effects the human brain function, and they have used a variety of technologies looking, for example, very simple like does it interfere with your ability to hem memorize, cognitive tests? does it interfere with enreceive lo graphic signals? does it interfere with the tissue when you send a magnetic pulse? and there have been, also, studies that have been done using imaging technologies like

the one we use which is tomography. but those studies differ from ours on a very important thing. all of those studies measure -- [inaudible] >> host: cerebral blood flow. >> guest: the main mechanism by which the brain delivers nutrients, glucose, oxygen. but it's also the main mechanism by which the brain cools the tissues. very, very narrow windows, so there is a certain increase in the blood, your blood flow will be increasing in that area to bring it down. on the other hand, it directly measures the level of activity of the tissue. so, which is a function, of course, of what type of stimulation, what type of processing it's performing. so they differ in those two, in that very important. one was done on blood flow, and there's been studies by two independent laboratories that have measured the effect on she

cerebral blood flow. this is the first that has measured the effects on brain glucose metabolism. now, you take advantage of what all of the others have done, right? and one of the things that have been, in my brain, worrisome about the prior studies, of course, it's easier to say that, basically, all of those studies were done in a very small sample size, very few summits. i think -- subjects. i think that the largest study may have been 14 or at the most 16 subjects. now, that is okay if you are expecting a large effect. so if i study the effects of eyes closed or eyes open, ten subjects will be sufficient for me to show that effect. but with cell phones where we actually expect a very small effect -- because if it were a big effect, we would see it behaviorally -- we then power our study to be able to detect the small effect which was not the case for any of the prior imaging studies and which may

have been one of the reasons why we were able to show a significant effect like the one that we showed that is linked with the exposure close the antenna. having said that, other studies, there was a study that showed with cerebral blood flow that was significant that the area of the antenna -- in that case the antenna was here -- there was a decrease in cerebral blood flow, and that was 123457b9. -- significant. we are seeing an increase in the areas near to the antenna. and that study shows significant increases in blood flow far away from the antenna. so it's very difficult to integrate with what we observe which is encloses in glucose consumption close to the antenna and nothing significant far away from the antenna. now, there's a third, the third difference between the methods that we're using, and this has

to do with the method itself. when you're measuring blood flow with this technology, positive terror tomography, you are averaging over 60 seconds which is good for certain things. well, if you are measuring brain glucose metabolism, your average is 20-30 minutes. so if you're interested on observing a cumulative effect of stimulation, then having a window of 20-30 minutes increases your sensitivity for detection as opposed to having a window of 60 seconds. and i always use the metaphor of a camera. so if you have very low levels of light and you are opening your aperture for a very short period of time, the likelihood that you take a picture, a photograph is very low as opposed if you leave it wide open and, of course, not moving it but just wide open.

that will allow you to extract the photograph even when the light conditions are very low. so i am using that metaphor to say the other advantage of using a technology that allows us to integrate an average, the activity that is occurring over a 30-minute period. >> host: dr. volkow, you're the director of the national institute on drug abuse. >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: why are you conducting this study on cell phones? >> guest: well, it is a convoluted story, and there is, there is a story to the story. what has happened is all of my professional life i've been very interested in the studying the effects of drugs in the human brain. and the main tool that i've used has been imaging technologies. positive terror imaging tomography is one of the technologies i have been using with my team at the national laboratory.

but the other imaging technology that we've been also extensively using is magnetic resonance imaging which relies on magnetic fields, static and changing, in order to see how the brain functions. so for the past 15 years our group has been interested in, you know, has been investigating whether, in fact, the properties of the bag nettic -- magnetic fields used in mri imaging by themselves would have an effect on brain functions. so when we started the first study 16 years ago, it was a static magnetic field, and we showed that static magnetic fields overall don't seem to effect glucose metabolism in the brain. but we recently showed that in contrast when you're using gradients which are rapidly shifting to magnetic currents, then we see a significant change in glucose metabolism in the human brain. and that, those results which

were very unexpected in my brain immediately said if we are seeing an effect, -- not on the properties of the field that is constant, but one that is changing -- that is to say it's not necessarily the intensity of the magnet itself if it's static, but its frequencies that may be relevant that led us to study whether cell phones would effect brain glucose metabolism. so it came because we were trying to understand how the imaging tools that are used to understand human brain functions could, through the use of changing magnetic fields, effect the brain. that's how we came to study. >> host: how was the study conducted? >> guest: well, we recruited initially 48 subjects, and they were brought into the laboratory, ask and the connection -- and the testing were done to insure these were healthy controls. all of these subjects had histories of cell phone

exposures. they were tested on two different days, and the order of the days was randomized. on every given day, the subjects had two cell phones placed, one on the left and one on the right, and these were secured by a muffler to insure positioning. the lower power was to the -- [inaudible] the subjects did not know whether the crives were -- cell phones were off or on, nor did they know whether the right or the left cell phone would be on. and this was done because we did not want the effects -- [inaudible] if i have a cell phone here, i may have prior to my experience with using cell phones expect, make me alert to try to figure out if something that could confound our results. so in order to control for expectations, we put two cell phones. and for half of the summits the -- subjects the first day the right phone was on, and for the other half on that first day

both phones were off. we started the activity of the phones 20 minutes -- actually there was 30 minutes before we started, before we injected them with a radioactive glucose because we wanted a long-lasting expose your. thirty minutes after initialization of the stimulation, we inject the radioactive glucose and maintain the cell phones on for 20 more minutes. and that allowed for a total of 50 minutes of cell phone exposure. at the end of that 20 -- at the end of the 20 minutes, cell phoning were turned off, the patients were brought into the scanner, laid into the scanner, and then we measure brain glucose metabolism which takes approximately 20 minutes to obtain those images. but those images, what you are doing there is measuring the glucose that has been trapped over those first 30 minutes. and that's why it allows you to

average the activity of what occurred in that period. and so then once you are measuring the glucose is already trapped, and it's not going to change. so it allows you to take a fixed photograph of what happened just before you took the persons into the camera. >> host: do you use a cell phone up to your ear? >> guest: i use a cell phone all the time, but i don't use it up to my ear. >> host: why? >> guest: because i'm neurotic when it comes to the brain. [laughter] i, my perspective on something like this, and again, i do not know if there is any harm, and it's interesting to look at history and how people react to new technologies with fear. when we look at it, it says how could they have been afraid? the people were afraid of electricity. but it's normal. we don't know about that technology, and it turn out that there's nothing harmful. on the other hand, radiation. we were not afraid of radiation, and it turn out that there are harmful effects.

because i don't know and there's such an easy solution since i love my cell phone, why not? i mean, it doesn't cost me anything. it's, to me, a non-brainer. well, let the scientists figure it out if there is or is not harmful effects. i can have my cake and eat it too. i can use the cell phone and minimize any potentially -- if there is -- negative effects by keeping the cell phone away from my head. >> host: what about the use of a blue tooth or some other ear device? >> guest: we have not evaluated, and i think it is important to evaluate the blue tooth. again, until we have more information, it is the very difficult to determine whether one should have any concerns or not at all. i don't think there's information. >> host: who funded this study, and what was budgeted for it? >> guest: well, you know, i have two lives. one of them is i direct the national institute on drug abuse, but the other life of mine is an investigator.

so this study is a result of my life of an investigator, and my laboratory is part of the national institute of alcohol abuse and alcoholism. and it's a study that was done at brook haven national laboratory which is where i keep my laboratory. >> host: so fully funded by the u.s. taxpayer? >> guest: fully funded by the u.s. taxpayer. there's no private company. >> host: dr. nora volkow is the director of the national institute on drug abuse, she also conducted the most recent cell phone study which you can find online at c-span.org/communicators. dr. volkow, thanks for being with us. >> guest: thanks for having me. >> host: and now joining us on "the communicators" is dr. kenneth foster who is a bioengineering professor at the university of pennsylvania who has done a lot of research on radio frequency energy. dr. foster, we've been talking with dr. volkow about the cell phone study conducted by her group with nih. what's your opinion of this study 1234. >> guest: well, i think it will

be very hard to interpret. for one thing, the subjects received almost no exposure, and the effect they reported was very small. and so it will be very hard to understand what it means. >> host: does it matter what kind of phone they used in this study? >> guest: well, it does. um, this particular phone they used it was a samsung handset, and i can't imagine a phone that's less able to produce exposure to somebody's brain. >> host: why do you say that? >> guest: well, the antenna was located at the very bottom of the phone, as far away from the brain as possible, and the pattern of absorption in the head was pretty much limit today the cheek and the jaw. another problem was that the phone was receiving a message from somebody else, and these kinds of phones under those conditions only transmit infrequently just to tell the system that it's still

connected. and so the level of radiation from the phone was quite low. and also with those phones the level of transmission is determined by how strong the signal is from the local base station. these are always powered down to provide the lowest level of communication possible. and so given these factors, there's -- and also the phone was some distance from the head. the author said they used a muffler or something between the phone and the head. and so given these uncertainties, there's really no way of knowing what the exposure was. i would -- but i'm quite sure that it's extremely low. in fact, this is, basically, a homeopathic study. very tiny levels of exposure. >> host: so, dr. foster, when you -- if they had used an iphone or a destroyed, do you think there would have been -- or a droid, do you think there would have been different results? >> guest: yes. different parallels, but since the level of transmission is so variable depending on all sorts

of things, they would really have had to have worked in collaboration with an engineer who understands these things and perhaps use a cell phone which had been modify today put out a given level of signal. as it is, there's no way to even guess what exposure these subjects received to their brains other than knowing that it's very low. >> host: so when you look at the plethora of studies that have been done on cell phone use and its potential effects on the brain, what -- do you have a conclusion at all? >> >> guest: yes. my conclusion is, basically, that of health agencies that have looked at this which is that there have been many reports of studies, there have been a number of effects that have been reported from cell phone use, but they're all small, they have no clear biological significance, and they tend to come and go. so there's really no clear evidence after all these years that there are significant health effects from using mobile phones. >> host: now, do you have any connection with the cell phone companies in your research, sir?

>> guest: no. i'm a professional engineer, and sometimes i provide calculations to determine whether transmitting facilities comply with federal regulations, but that's quite a different thing. >> host: dr. kenneth foster, bioengineering department at the university of pennsylvania. thank you for being on "the communicators." >> guest: nice to be with you. >> host: in 2010 a book came outside, it was called "disconnect," and it was britain -- written by deborah davis. in your presentation about your book, you said you went from three cell phones to no cell phones. is that correct? and why? >> guest: no, i didn't go to none, i still have one, but i certainly gave up my three because i began to learn that contemporary to what mr. foster just told you, a number of health agencies have issued warnings about cell phones, some as long ago as ten years. the british government had a review grouped that that looked at cell phones in the year 2