We talk to TSSG researcher Ian Mills about how VR could be used to help rewire human brains and tackle Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and depression.

Focusing on the connectome, TSSG researcher Ian Mills is looking at the brain in the same way technologists would look at a topological map of a network.

“It can be thought of as a wiring map of the brain. In real-world network terms, this is the full network graph of the functional brain network and can be thought of on a micro-scale as individual neurons as nodes, and synapses as edges. On the macro-scale, nodes can be considered regions of interest, and the exons between these regions considered as the network edges.”

Mills said that the key is to look for the outliers of brain diseases in a neurological sense and, in a virtual context, feed VR experiences to the brain.

Words by John Kennedy