Expert: Daniel Mazur - 1/28/2006

Question
Hello,
I'm in the 7th grade and I'm doing a science fair project. My topic is "How does cell phone radiation affect the brain?" I have done some research but I don't know what to do for an experiment. Some of my research says that cell phone radiation causes brain tumors/cancer and other research says that it helps the memory. I'm very confused. I hope you can help me. I will really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Sana  

Answer
Hi Sana,

the effect of cell phones on brain is a complex topic and even in the grown-up scientific community several opinions exist. You have noticed that yourself.

In my opinion it is most important to state the key question of your science fair project in a way that it allows you to actually do a meaningful experiment. I suggest you push the general "How does cell phone radiation affect the brain?" question aside, because you can only answer it in terms of what you hear and read. It is unlikely you will be able to verify all the answers or come up with an answer explaining all others.

It will be much more feasible to pick one particular effect that cell phones MAY have on brain and then design an experiment to investigate that. You can hardly pick the cancer problem, because there is not enough knowledge about causes for cancer in general, not to mention that instruments and methods to investigate brain directly are hard to come by and need an expert operator. But how about a question like "Does cell phone radiation affect memory?" You can pick this one, or one or your own invention like "Does cell phone radiation affect a reaction time to external stimuli?", "Does it affect attentiveness? Color eyesight perception? Hearing resolution? Fluency of speech?..." There are tons of small questions to ask, each needing a separate experiment and each yielding a small answer that contributes to the very demanding answer to the BIG question you put as your topic at the beginning.

I will leave to you to pick the questions you want to build your experiments around. Let me just give a few small pieces of advice:

- Make it simple ("transparent") enough, so that you, your classmates and your teachers have no problem seeing the point.
- Keep in mind that unless you actually open peoples' skulls, you never observe the brain alone. With any indirect (external) experiment you are watching a complex of systems:  For example, if I try to investigate the "color eyesight" question, I will be dealing with the complex EYE-BRAIN/COLOR RESOLUTION-BRAIN/VERBAL SKILL. If the radiation, by chance, has a strong effect on eyes and none on brain itself, I won't be able to distinguish it. So, make sure you are aware of such pitfalls. It is not so important to eliminate them, but it is crucial to know about them.
- Be aware that psychological factors may distort the results. It is well known that people react differently in "real life" and when they know they are being observed. The least that can be done to eliminate such influences is to arrange identical conditions for your subjects, do several experimental runs with many subjects and cell phones on and off and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, never let the subject know, whether at a given instant the cell phones are on or off!

I wish you the best of lucks. Go ahead and ask, if you have further questions.

Cheers!
Daniel