Holding a cell phone against your ear changes the activity in your brain, according to a new study that shows the brain is sensitive to the phone’s radiation emissions.
Whether the increased sensitivity is harmless or hurtful to the brain is still up for debate, say researchers from the National Institutes of Health, who found that less than an hour of cell phone use is linked to increased activity in the part of the brain closest to the phone antenna.
It’s not clear yet whether the radiation is potentially carcinogenic or has any other negative health implications — or positive ones, for that matter, says lead author Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about the research in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
In the year-long study on 47 people, scientists used dye injections and positron emission tomography (PET) scans to measure brain glucose metabolism, which is an indication of the brain’s activity. When cell phones were placed against the subjects’ ears for 50 minutes — some phones with the sound muted, some turned off without the subjects’ knowledge — metabolism in the brain region closest to the antenna was about 7% higher when the cell phone was on.
The orbitofrontal cortex — one of the two areas that lit up on the scans — is “broadly associated with emotion, sense of smell, memory, eating, aggression — a whole range of behaviors,” says Murali Doraiswamy, head of biological psychiatry at Duke Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s like an orchestra conductor instead of just an individual musician with specific task.”
The temporal area, which also lit up, is critical to language and memory, says Keith Black, chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “This study raises a lot of questions,” says Black, who…