Name: 【TED】Carl Schoonover: How to look inside the brain (Carl Schoonover: How to look inside the brain)
Uploaded: 2017-03-04T02:31:55.000Z
Duration: 5 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain.

Adverbs of degree

And some things look very familiar today.

Two eyes at the bottom, optic nerve flowing out from the back.

that doesn't seem to be connected to anything in particular.

to more recent representations of the visual system,

you'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated

And that's because today we can see what's inside of the brain,

rather than just looking at its overall shape.

Imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works

and all you could see was a keyboard, a mouse, a screen.

You want to be able to open it up, crack it open,

And up until a little more than a century ago,

nobody was able to do that with the brain.

Nobody had had a glimpse of the brain's wiring.

And that's because if you take a brain out of the skull

put it under even a very powerful microscope,

There's no structure. It won't tell you anything.

And this all changed in the late 19th century.

Suddenly, new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed

and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring.

So what really launched modern neuroscience

Instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue,

it somehow only stains about one percent of them.

It clears the forest, reveals the trees inside.

If everything had been labeled, nothing would have been visible.

Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal,

who's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience,

applied this Golgi stain, which yields data which looks like this,

and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell, the neuron.

And if you're thinking of the brain as a computer,

that form circuits just like in a computer.

Today, a century later, when researchers want to visualize neurons,

they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them.

which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish,

Because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein

or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein,

you get a cell to glow many different colors.

this is from a genetically engineered mouse called "Brainbow."

because all of these neurons are glowing different colors.

Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify

individual molecular components of neurons, molecules,

with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system.

But it turns out that they're so useful to the immune system

because they can recognize specific molecules,

in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain,

recognize specific substructures of the cell

And a lot of the images I've been showing you here are very beautiful,

This, for example, is an antibody staining

against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain.

And you've heard of serotonin, of course,

in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety.

which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases.

And in order to understand how serotonin works,

it's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is.

can be used to understand that sort of question.

I'd like to leave you with the following thought:

are both totally natural products at the get-go.

in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason,

or in order to detect the coat protein of an invading virus, for example.