2012年2月29日星期三

The Man Working To Reverse-Engineer Your Brain

Our brains are filled with billions of neurons, entangled like a dense canopy of tropical forest branches. When we think of a concept or a memory — or have a perception or feeling — our brain's neurons quickly fire and talk to each other across connections called synapses.

How these neurons interact with each other — and what the wiring is like between them — is key to understanding our identity, says Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at MIT.

Seung's new book,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, explains how mapping out our neural connections in our brains might be the key to understanding the basis of things like personality, memory, perception and ideas, as well as illnesses that happen in the brain, like autism and schizophrenia.

"These kinds of disorders have been a puzzle for a long time," says Seung. "We can look at other brain diseases, like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, and see clear evidence that there is something wrong in the brain."

But with schizophrenia and autism, there's no clear abnormality during autopsy dissections, says Seung.

"We believe these are brain disorders because of lots of indirect evidence,We are professional Plastic mould, but we can't look at the brain directly and see something is wrong," he says. "So the hypothesis is that the neurons are healthy, but they are simply connected together or organized in an abnormal way."

One current theory, says Seung,I have just spent two weeks shopping for tile and have discovered Chinese porcelain tile.China Porcelain tile is that there's a connection between the wiring that develops between neurons during early infancy and developmental disorders like schizophrenia and autism.

"In autism, the development of the brain is hypothesized to go awry sometime before age 2, maybe in the womb," he says. "In schizophrenia, no one knows for sure when the development is going off course. We know that schizophrenia tends to emerge in early adulthood, so many people believe that something abnormal is happening during adolescence. Or it could be that something is happening much earlier and it's not revealed until you become an adult."

What scientists do know, he says, is that the wiring of the brain in the first three years is critical for development. Infants born with cataracts in poor countries that don't have the resources to restore their eyesight remain blind even after surgery is performed on them later in life.
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"No matter how much they practice seeing, they can never really see," says Seung. "They recover some visual function, but they are still blind by comparison to you and me. And one hypothesis is that the brain didn't wire up properly when they were babies, so by the time they become adults, there's no way for the brain to learn how to see properly."

At birth, he says, you are born with all of the neurons you will ever have in life, except for neurons that exist in two specific areas of the brain: the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, which is thought to help new memories form, and the olfactory bulb, which is involved in your sense of smell.

"The obvious hypothesis [is] that these two areas need to be highly plastic and need to learn more than other regions, and that's why new neurons have to be created — to give these regions more potential for learning," says Seung. "But we don't really have any proof of that hypothesis."

But not everything is set in stone from birth.Here's a complete list of oil painting supplies for the beginning oil painter. The complex synaptic connections that allow neurons to communicate with one another develop after babies have left the womb.

"As far as we know, this is happening throughout your life," he says.What is a third party payment gateway ? "Part of the reason that we are lifelong learners — that no matter how old you get, you can still learn something new — may be due to the fact that synapse creation and elimination are both continuing into adulthood."

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