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What Our Brains Can Teach Us
By DAVID EAGLEMAN - Published: February 22, 2013
AFTER President Obama’s recent announcement of a plan to invigorate the study of neuroscience
with what could amount to a $3 billion investment, a reasonable taxpayer might ask: Why brain
science? Why now?
Here’s why. Imagine you were an alien catching sight of the Earth. Your species knows nothing
about humans, let alone how to interpret the interactions of seven billion people in complex social
networks. With no acquaintance with the nuances of human language or behavior, it proves
impossible to decipher the secret idiom of neighborhoods and governments, the interplay of local
and global culture, or the intertwining economies of nations. It just looks like pandemonium, a
meaningless Babel.
So it goes with the brain. We are the aliens in that landscape, and the brain is an even more
complicated cipher. It is composed of 100 billion electrically active cells called neurons, each
connected to many thousands of its neighbors. Each neuron relays information in the form of
miniature voltage spikes, which are then converted into chemical signals that bridge the gap to
other neurons. Most neurons send these signals many times per second; if each signaling event
were to make a sound as loud as a pin dropping, the cacophony from a single human head would
blow out all the windows. The complexity of such a system bankrupts our language; observing the
brain with our current technologies, we mostly detect an enigmatic uproar.
Looking at the brain from a distance isn’t much use, nor is zooming in to a single neuron. A new
kind of science is required, one that can track and analyze the activity of billions of neurons
simultaneously.
That’s a tall order, but it’s worth it, because this is an exceptionally personal mystery to crack. Our
thoughts, desires, agonies and ecstasies all emerge from the details of the neural landscape.
Just as an alien studying the planet could catalog several large-scale calamities — disease
epidemics, volcanic eruptions, political-feedback loops that lead to war — so can we observe
disasters transpiring in the dense communities of our brain cells. We give them names like
neurodegeneration, stroke and epilepsy. But just because we can name them doesn’t mean we
know how to fix them. For example, we have little idea how to mend the damage from the
widespread destruction of a traumatic brain injury (the signature injury of America’s wars). The
same goes for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, and for brain tumors,
autism, dementia, paralysis and so on.
While we have improved our ability to diagnose problems, we have yet to understand how to
remedy them. Learning to better speak the language of the brain is our best hope for turning the
chaos into order, for unmasking and addressing the hidden patterns behind disease.
But deciphering the neural code is not only about physical health. Consider the implications for
societal health. A deeper understanding of mental illness will improve early detection, resources
and rehabilitation, potentially helping us find a way to stop using our prisons as a de facto mental
health care system. Similarly, we can leverage brain science for a more cost-effective approach to
drug crime. We cannot win the war on drugs simply by attacking supply; we must focus on
demand. And that requires decoding the circuitry and pharmacology in the brain of the addict.
Beyond social policy, a better understanding of the brain will steer the future of our technologies.
Smart people have been beating at the door of artificial intelligence for decades with only limited
success. Google Translate can convert any language to any other, but understands nothing of the
content. Watson still can’t answer simple questions like, “When President Obama walks into a
room, does his nose come with him?” Our most promising hope for creating artificial intelligence
is figuring out how natural intelligence works.
It can also usher in an era of bio-inspired machinery. You can’t pull a piece of circuitry out of your
smartphone and expect the phone to function. But when a young child with severe epilepsy has
half of her brain surgically removed, she tends to do just fine: the remaining brain tissue
automatically rewires itself to take over responsibility for the parts that are missing. Similarly,
when an animal breaks a leg, its brain adapts the gait of the remaining legs so the animal can
keep moving.
We don’t know how to build self-configuring machines like these. When a Mars rover loses a
wheel, our investment ends: it becomes another piece of immovable space junk. Imagine a future
in which we capitalize on the principles of neural reconfiguration, producing devices — from
smartphones to cars to space stations — that flexibly adapt rather than bust. For now, the brain is
the only functioning example of such futuristic machinery on our planet.
Brain health, drug rehabilitation, computer intelligence, adaptive devices — these economic
drivers would lavishly pay back any investment in brain research. So when a taxpayer asks how to
endow our country with a confident future, you can reply, the answer is right in back of your eyes.
David Eagleman, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, is the author
of “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.”
The Next Frontier Is Inside Your Brain
By PHILIP M. BOFFEY - Published: February 23, 2013
The Obama administration is planning a multiyear research effort to produce an “activity
map” that would show in unprecedented detail the workings of the human brain, the most
complex organ in the body. It is a breathtaking goal at a time when Washington, hobbled by
partisan gridlock and deficit worries, seems unable to launch any major new programs.
This effort — if sufficiently financed — could develop new tools and techniques that would
lead to a much deeper understanding of how the brain works. The ultimate aim, probably not
reachable for decades, is to answer such fundamental questions as how the brain generates
thoughts, dreams, memories, perception and consciousness — and to find ways to intervene
and influence such brain activities. It may also be possible to determine how the brain
changes over time in response to learning.
We are a long way from that kind of understanding today. Scientists using electrodes and
existing imaging technologies have been able to study how individual neurons and small
networks of neurons respond to stimuli. But the human brain has some 100 billion neurons,
each interacting with perhaps 10,000 other neurons through complex circuitry that no
existing technology has the speed or resolution to track. All told, there could be 1,000 trillion
connections between neurons in the brain.
Scientists have been able to infer the main functions of certain regions of the human brain by
studying patients with head injuries, brain tumors and neurological diseases or by measuring
oxygen levels and glucose consumption in the brains of healthy people, according to Dr.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. But as Dr. Collins explains, this
is like listening to the string section alone instead of the entire orchestra.
The sweeping scope of the new initiative, which has not yet been officially unveiled, was
revealed by John Markoff in The Times on Monday. Fortunately, there is a strong base of
knowledge to build on. Researchers have already made significant discoveries about brain
functioning. They have identified how neurons behave at the point where anesthetized
patients lose awareness, bringing us a step closer to understanding the nature of
consciousness. They have linked certain areas of the brain to musical creativity and other
areas to the formation of emotions and habits.
Scientists have even determined what animals are dreaming by first having them walk
through certain locations in a fixed order and recording which neurons are activated. Then
when the animal is sleeping, they can see if the same neurons are firing in the same order, an
indication that the animal is probably dreaming about the walking it had just done. This
rather simple experiment involves putting electrodes in the brain to record perhaps 100
neurons at a time. To really understand what is happening when an individual dreams,
scientists will need to record what happens to many thousands or possibly millions of
neurons as the dream is unfolding.
Recent advances in nanotechnology, microelectronics, optics, data compression and storage,
cloud computing, information theory and synthetic biology could help make possible
investigations that were unimaginable before. For instance, scientists might extend the value
of traditional brain scans by implanting nanosensors, wireless fiber-optic probes or
genetically engineered living cells to penetrate brain tissue and report which neurons are
firing and when in response to various stimuli.
There should be clinical benefits as well. The knowledge developed could enable biomedical
scientists to find more accurate ways to diagnose and treat depression, schizophrenia,
dementia, autism, stroke, Parkinson’s and other illnesses or injuries of the brain.
President Obama hinted at broad ambitions for scientific advancement in his State of the
Union address, saying, “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen
since the height of the space race.” He mentioned mapping the human brain, but it’s more
likely that scientists will start with smaller brains and central nervous systems — like those of
worms, fruit flies, zebra fish and small mammals — before they move on to primates. No firm
budget exists yet, but some leading researchers say this initiative may require more than
$300 million a year, or some $3 billion over the first decade, in federal support. Whether that
is new money or drawn from existing well-financed programs, it is an investment worth
making.
Of the big scientific programs in the past half-century, few if any were as daunting as the
brain project. The race with Russia to land men on the Moon in the 1960s was comparatively
straightforward because it was largely achieved with technologies that already existed. The
Human Genome Project, completed a decade ago, had a clearly defined goal — to identify the
complete sequence of genes on every chromosome in the body — and there was little doubt it
was achievable; the only question was how fast and at what cost.
By contrast, the brain project will have to create new tools to explore an organ that is the seat
of human cognition and behavior. A task of that magnitude can truly capture the
imagination.