Name: 【TED】Sam Rodriques: What we'll learn about the brain in the next century (What we'll learn about the brain in the next century | Sam Rodriques)
Uploaded: 2018-07-03T22:02:09.000Z
Duration: 13 min 32 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...

I want to tell you guys something about neuroscience.

to come and try to understand how the brain works.

Lots of people are working on depression.

depression is something that we really want to understand.

you take a jar and you fill it up, about halfway, with water.

And then you take a mouse, and you put the mouse in the jar, OK?

And the mouse swims around for a little while

and then at some point, the mouse gets tired

And when it stops swimming, that's depression.

so I'm used to people making very sophisticated mathematical models

to precisely describe physical phenomena,

so when I saw that this is the model for depression,

I though to myself, "Oh my God, we have a lot of work to do."

But this is a kind of general problem in neuroscience.

Lots of people want to understand emotion.

But you can't study emotion in mice or monkeys

how they're feeling or what they're experiencing.

So instead, people who want to understand emotion,

typically end up studying what's called motivated behavior,

which is code for "what the mouse does when it really, really wants cheese."

I mean, the point is, the NIH spends about 5.5 billion dollars a year

And yet there have been almost no significant improvements in outcomes

for patients with brain diseases in the past 40 years.

And I think a lot of that is basically due to the fact

that mice might be OK as a model for cancer or diabetes,

but the mouse brain is just not sophisticated enough

to reproduce human psychology or human brain disease.

So if the mouse models are so bad, why are we still using them?

which are these little cells that send electrical signals to each other.

If you want to understand how the brain works,

you have to be able to measure the electrical activity of these neurons.

But to do that, you have to get really close to the neurons

with some kind of electrical recording device or a microscope.

And so you can do that in mice and you can do it in monkeys,

because you can physically put things into their brain

but for some reason we still can't do that in humans, OK?

So instead, we've invented all these proxies.

So the most popular one is probably this,

which allows you to make these pretty pictures like this,

that show which parts of your brain light up

when you're engaged in different activities.

You're not actually measuring neural activity here.

What you're doing is you're measuring, essentially,

It's actually where there's more oxygen, but you get the idea, OK?

The other thing that you can do is you can do this --

electroencephalography -- you can put these electrodes on your head, OK?

And then you can measure your brain waves.

And here, you're actually measuring electrical activity.

But you're not measuring the activity of neurons.

You're measuring these electrical currents,

So the point is just that these technologies that we have

Because, for most of the diseases that we want to understand --

like, Parkinson's is the classic example.

In Parkinson's, there's one particular kind of neuron deep in your brain

and these technologies just don't have the resolution that you need

And so that's why we're still stuck with the animals.

Not that anyone wants to be studying depression

It's just that there's this pervasive sense that it's not possible

to look at the activity of neurons in healthy humans.

To have a look at one way in which I think it could potentially be possible.

And I want to preface this by saying, I don't have all the details.

So I'm just going to provide you with a kind of outline.

Well, to start with, the climate is a bit warmer that what you're used to.

And that robotic vacuum cleaner that you know and love

and the improvements were not always so good.

But actually, in the year 2100 most things are surprisingly recognizable.

It's just the brain is totally different.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Sam Rodriques: What we'll learn about the brain in the next century (What we'll learn about the brain in the next century | Sam Rodriques)

essentially

sophisticated

figure

depression