Brain science: For a better understanding of billions of neurons

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 7 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 neighbourhoods 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 neighbours. 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 analyse 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.

Best hope

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 capitalise 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.