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Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries of The Brain
Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries of The Brain
By David Eagleman Source: Discover Magazine Of all the objects in the universe, the human many neurons in the brain as there are stars surprise that, espite the glo! from recent a min , !e still fin ourselves s"uinting in the brain is the most complex: There are as in the Milky Way galaxy. So it is no vances in the science of the brain an ark some!hat.
#ut !e are at least beginning to grasp the crucial mysteries of neuroscience an starting to make hea !ay in a ressing them. $ven partial ans!ers to these %& "uestions coul restructure our un erstan ing of the roughly three'poun mass of gray an !hite matter that efines !ho !e are.
binary, all'or'nothing spikes appear to carry information about the !orl : What o * see+ ,m * hungry+ Which !ay shoul * turn+ #ut !hat is the co e of these millisecon bits of voltage+ Spikes may mean ifferent things at ifferent places an times in the brain. *n parts of the central nervous system -the brain an spinal cor ., the rate of spiking often correlates !ith clearly efinable external features, like the presence of a color or a face. *n the peripheral nervous system, more spikes in icates more heat, a lou er soun , or a stronger muscle contraction. ,s !e elve eeper into the brain, ho!ever, !e fin populations of neurons involve in more complex phenomena, like reminiscence, value ju gments, simulation of possible futures, the esire for a mate, an so on/an here the signals become ifficult to ecrypt. The challenge is something like popping the cover off a computer, measuring a fe! transistors chattering bet!een high an lo! voltage, an trying to guess the content of the Web page being surfe . *t is likely that mental information is store not in single cells but in populations of cells an patterns of their activity. 0o!ever, it is currently not clear ho! to kno! !hich neurons belong to a particular group1 !orse still, current technologies -like sticking fine electro es irectly into the brain. are not !ell suite to measuring several thousan neurons at once. (or is it simple to monitor the connections of even one neuron: , typical neuron in the cortex receives input from some %&,&&& other neurons. ,lthough traveling bursts of voltage can carry signals across the brain "uickly, those electrical spikes may not be the only/or even the main/!ay that information is carrie in nervous systems. 2or!ar 'looking stu ies are examining other possible information couriers: glial cells -poorly un erstoo brain cells that are %& times as common as neurons., other kin s of signaling mechanisms bet!een cells -such as ne!ly iscovere gases an pepti es., an the biochemical casca es that take place insi e cells.
$xperience can, for example, fortify the connections bet!een the smell of coffee, its taste, its color, an the feel of its !armth. Since the populations of neurons connecte !ith each of these sensations are typically activate at the same time, the connections bet!een them can cause all the sensory associations of coffee to be triggere by the smell alone. #ut looking only at associations/an strengthene connections bet!een neurons/ may not be enough to explain memory. The great secret of memory is that it mostly enco es the relationships bet!een things more than the etails of the things themselves. When you memori)e a melo y, you enco e the relationships bet!een the notes, not the notes per se, !hich is !hy you can easily sing the song in a ifferent key. Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When * ask if you kno! ,lex 5itchie, the ans!er is imme iately obvious to you, an there is no goo theory to explain ho! memory retrieval can happen so "uickly. Moreover, the act of retrieval can estabili)e the memory. When you recall a past event, the memory becomes temporarily susceptible to erasure. Some intriguing recent experiments sho! it is possible to chemically block memories from reforming uring that !in o!, suggesting ne! ethical "uestions that re"uire careful consi eration.
When a fire chief encounters a ne! bla)e, he "uickly makes pre ictions about ho! to best position his men. 5unning such simulations of the future/!ithout the risk an expense of actually attempting them/allo!s 6our hypotheses to ie in our stea ,7 as philosopher 9arl :opper put it. 2or this reason, the emulation of possible futures is one of the key businesses that intelligent brains invest in. ;et !e kno! little about ho! the brain3s future simulator !orks because tra itional neuroscience technologies are best suite for correlating brain activity !ith explicit behaviors, not mental emulations. One i ea suggests that the brain3s resources are evote not only to processing stimuli an reacting to them -!atching a ball come at you. but also to constructing an internal mo el of that outsi e !orl an extracting rules for ho! things ten to behave -kno!ing ho! balls move through the air.. *nternal mo els may play a role not only in motor acts, like catching, but also in perception. 2or example, vision ra!s on significant amounts of information in the brain, not just on input from the retina. Many neuroscientists have suggeste over the past fe! eca es that perception arises not simply by buil ing up bits of ata through a hierarchy but rather by matching incoming sensory ata against internally generate expectations. #ut ho! oes a system learn to make goo pre ictions about the !orl + *t may be that memory exists only for this purpose. This is not a ne! i ea: T!o millennia ago, ,ristotle an <alen emphasi)e memory as a tool in making successful pre ictions for the future. $ven your memories about your life may come to be un erstoo as a special subtype of emulation, one that is pinne o!n an thus likely to flo! in a certain irection.
One goal of emotional neuroscience is to un erstan the nature of the many isor ers of emotion, epression being the most common an costly. *mpulsive aggression an violence are also thought to be conse"uences of faulty emotion regulation.
system, the sight of your fingers an the soun of the snap seem simultaneous. ;our brain is employing fancy e iting tricks to make simultaneous events in the !orl feel simultaneous to you, even !hen the ifferent senses processing the information !oul in ivi ually s!ear other!ise. 2or a simple example of ho! your brain plays tricks !ith time, look in the mirror at your left eye. (o! shift your ga)e to your right eye. ;our eye movements take time, of course, but you o not see your eyes move. *t is as if the !orl instantly ma e the transition from one vie! to the next. What happene to that little gap in time+ 2or that matter, !hat happens to the ?& millisecon s of arkness you shoul see every time you blink your eyes+ #ottom line: ;our notion of the smooth passage of time is a construction of the brain. =larifying the picture of ho! the brain normally solves timing problems shoul give insight into !hat happens !hen temporal calibration goes !rong, as may happen in the brains of people !ith yslexia. Sensory inputs that are out of sync also contribute to the risk of falls in el erly patients.
ays, but not bet!een sessions on the same ay, implicating sleep in the learning process. An erstan ing ho! sleeping an reaming are change by trauma, rugs, an isease/an ho! !e might mo ulate our nee for sleep/is a rich fiel to harvest for future clues.
*. How do t"e s$ecialized systems of t"e #rain integrate wit" one anot"er?
To the nake eye, no part of the brain3s surface looks terribly ifferent from any other part. #ut !hen !e measure activity, !e fin that ifferent types of information lurk in each region of the neural territory. Within vision, for example, separate areas process motion, e ges, faces, an colors. The territory of the a ult brain is as fracture as a map of the countries of the !orl . (o! that neuroscientists have a reasonable i ea of ho! that territory is ivi e , !e fin ourselves looking at a strange assortment of brain net!orks involve !ith smell, hunger, pain, goal setting, temperature, pre iction, an hun re s of other tasks. 4espite their isparate functions, these systems seem to !ork together seamlessly. There are almost no goo i eas about ho! this occurs. (or is it un erstoo ho! the brain coor inates its systems so rapi ly. The slo! spee of spikes -they travel about one foot per secon in axons that lack the insulating sheathing calle myelin. is one hun re 'millionth the spee of signal transmission in igital computers. ;et a human can recogni)e a frien almost instantaneously, !hile igital computers are slo!/an usually unsuccessful/at face recognition. 0o! can an organ !ith such slo! parts operate so "uickly+ The usual ans!er is that the brain is a parallel processor, running many operations at the same time. This is almost certainly true, but !hat slo!s o!n parallel'processing igital computers is the next stage of operations, !here results nee to be compare an eci e upon. #rains are ama)ingly fast at this. So !hile the brain3s ability to o parallel processing is impressive, its ability to rapi ly synthesi)e those parallel processes into a single, behavior'gui ing output is at least as significant. ,n animal running must go left or right aroun a tree1 it cannot o both. There is no special anatomical location in the brain !here information from all the ifferent systems converges1 rather, the speciali)e areas all interconnect !ith one another, forming a net!ork of parallel an recurring links. Someho!, our integrate image of the !orl emerges from this complex labyrinthine net!ork of brain structures. Surprisingly little stu y has been one on large, loopy net!orks like the ones in the brain/probably in part because it is easier to think about brains as ti y assembly lines than as ynamic net!orks.
,n explanation of consciousness is one of the major unsolve problems of mo ern science. *t may not turn out to be a single phenomenon1 nonetheless, by !ay of a preliminary target, let3s think of it as the thing that flickers on !hen you !ake up in the morning that !as not there, in the exact same brain har !are, moments before. (euroscientists believe that consciousness emerges from the material stuff of the brain primarily because even very small changes to your brain -say, by rugs or isease. can po!erfully alter your subjective experiences. The heart of the problem is that !e o not yet kno! ho! to engineer pieces an parts such that the resulting machine has the kin of private subjective experience that you an * take for grante . *f * give you all the Tinkertoys in the !orl an tell you to hook them up so that they form a conscious machine, goo luck. We on3t have a theory yet of ho! to o this1 !e on3t even kno! !hat the theory !ill look like. One of the tra itional challenges to consciousness research is stu ying it experimentally. *t is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes correlate !ith consciousness, !hile others o not. The first challenge is to etermine the ifference bet!een them. Some clever experiments are making at least a little hea !ay. *n one of these, subjects see an image of a house in one eye an , simultaneously, an image of a co! in the other. *nstea of perceiving a house'co! mixture, people perceive only one of them. Then, after some ran om amount of time, they !ill believe they3re seeing the other, an they !ill continue to s!itch slo!ly back an forth. ;et nothing about the visual stimulus changes1 only the conscious experience changes. This test allo!s investigators to probe !hich properties of neuronal activity correlate !ith the changes in subjective experience. The mechanisms un erlying consciousness coul resi e at any of a variety of physical levels: molecular, cellular, circuit, path!ay, or some organi)ational level not yet escribe . The mechanisms might also be a pro uct of interactions bet!een these levels. One compelling but still speculative notion is that the massive fee back circuitry of the brain is essential to the pro uction of consciousness. *n the near term, scientists are !orking to i entify the areas of the brain that correlate !ith consciousness. Then comes the next step: un erstan ing !hy they correlate. This is the so'calle har problem of neuroscience, an it lies at the outer limit of !hat material explanations !ill say about the experience of being human. ,E-./ED .,/01-E: =an B<enius :illsB #oost ;our #rain :o!er+