Name: 【TED】David Anderson: Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals (David Anderson: Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals)
Uploaded: 2017-04-30T19:56:40.000Z
Duration: 15 min 26 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...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

in your immediate family or circle of friends

who suffers from some form of mental illness.

basic research on fruit flies has anything to do

with understanding mental illness in humans.

Yeah. I thought so. I'm also not surprised.

I can see I've got my work cut out for me here.

psychiatric disorders like autism, depression and schizophrenia

and the understanding of their basic mechanisms

if you're concerned about a cancer diagnosis

and you go to your doctor, you get bone scans,

In 2013, if you're concerned about a depression diagnosis,

you go to your doctor, and what do you get?

Now, part of the reason for this is that we have

an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view

of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders.

and the popular press aids and abets this view --

as if the brain were some kind of bag of chemical soup

full of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine.

that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders,

like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry,

as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup.

because these drugs actually don't work all that well.

A lot of people won't take them, or stop taking them,

because of their unpleasant side effects.

because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder

is a bit like trying to change your engine oil

by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block.

Some of it will dribble into the right place,

but a lot of it will do more harm than good.

that you also heard about from Dr. Insel this morning,

is that psychiatric disorders are actually

disturbances of neural circuits that mediate

we analogize the brain to a computer. That's no problem.

Well it turns out that the computer analogy

It's just that we don't tend to think about it that way.

But we know much less about the circuit basis

Now, it's not that chemicals are not important

It's just that they don't bathe the brain like soup.

Rather, they're released in very specific locations

to change the flow of information in the brain.

the biological basis of psychiatric disorders,

we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain

Otherwise, we're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines

of the role of brain chemistry in brain circuitry,

it's helpful to work on what we biologists call

animals like fruit flies and laboratory mice,

in which we can apply powerful genetic techniques

as you heard about in Allan Jones's talk this morning.

we can actually activate specific neurons

or we can destroy or inhibit the activity of those neurons.

So if we inhibit a particular type of neuron,

On the other hand, if we activate a group of neurons

and we find that that produces the behavior,

we can conclude that those neurons are sufficient for the behavior.

So in this way, by doing this kind of test,

we can draw cause and effect relationships

in particular circuits and particular behaviors,

something that is extremely difficult, if not impossible,

But can an organism like a fruit fly, which is --