Name: 【TED】Ed Boyden: A new way to study the brain's invisible secrets (A new way to study the brain's invisible secrets | Ed Boyden)
Uploaded: 2016-10-06T00:20:52.000Z
Duration: 13 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Baby diapers have interesting properties.

They can swell enormously when you add water to them,

an experiment done by millions of kids every day.

is that they're designed in a very clever way.

They're made out of a thing called a swellable material.

It's a special kind of material that, when you add water,

And this is a very useful, industrial kind of polymer.

But what we're trying to do in my group at MIT

is to figure out if we can do something similar to the brain.

and see all the tiny building blocks, the biomolecules,

how they're organized in three dimensions,

the structure, the ground truth structure of the brain, if you will?

maybe we could have a better understanding of how the brain is organized

Maybe we could try to pinpoint the exact changes in the brain

diseases like Alzheimer's and epilepsy and Parkinson's,

for which there are few treatments, much less cures,

and for which, very often, we don't know the cause or the origins

is trying to take a different point of view

from the way neuroscience has been done over the last hundred years.

We're trying to figure out how to build technologies

that let us look at and repair the brain.

the brain is incredibly, incredibly complicated.

So what we've learned over the first century of neuroscience

is that the brain is a very complicated network,

made out of very specialized cells called neurons

and electrical currents will flow through these complexly shaped neurons.

Furthermore, neurons are connected in networks.

They're connected by little junctions called synapses that exchange chemicals

and allow the neurons to talk to each other.

and maybe a billion of those connections.

and, of course, this is just our artist's rendition of it.

What you would see are thousands and thousands of kinds of biomolecules,

little nanoscale machines organized in complex, 3D patterns,

and together they mediate those electrical pulses,

those chemical exchanges that allow neurons to work together

to generate things like thoughts and feelings and so forth.

Now, we don't know how the neurons in the brain are organized

and we don't know how the biomolecules are organized

to form these complex, organized machines.

if we could look at the organization of molecules and neurons

maybe we could really understand how the brain conducts information

Maybe we could pinpoint the exact set of molecular changes that occur

And once we know how those molecules have changed,

whether they've increased in number or changed in pattern,

we could use those as targets for new drugs,

for new ways of delivering energy into the brain

in order to repair the brain computations that are afflicted

in patients who suffer from brain disorders.

We've all seen lots of different technologies over the last century

These, of course, have the great power that they are noninvasive,

they can be used on living human subjects.

Each of these blobs that you see, or voxels, as they're called,

can contain millions and millions of neurons.

where it can pinpoint the molecular changes that occur

or the changes in the wiring of these networks

that contributes to our ability to be conscious and powerful beings.

At the other extreme, you have microscopes.

Microscopes, of course, will use light to look at little tiny things.

For centuries, they've been used to look at things like bacteria.

microscopes are actually how neurons were discovered in the first place,

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【TED】Ed Boyden: A new way to study the brain's invisible secrets (A new way to study the brain's invisible secrets | Ed Boyden)

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