Narrator: This is Science Today. Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, is a technique used to observe tiny electrical currents in the brain by measuring the magnetic fields that they produce outside of the skull.

Kraus: What magnetoencephalography allows us to do that is really a unique capability is to look at the functioning of your brain - what happens in your brain while you think, millisecond by millisecond, or one one thousandth of a second at a time, in real time. So that doctors can then spot when there are problems and also learn about problems at a very, very small time resolution.

Narrator: Physicist Robert Kraus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory helped enhance this method by developing an MEG helmet, which would do away with the need for hospitals to build very expensive, shielded rooms necessary to measure the magnetic fields.

Kraus: So that this technique can be used throughout the country. Only by having lots of doctors using it are we going to be able to understand the basic mental disorders to find cures.