What type of technology is being used to study the brain?

Francis Collins, MD, PhD, director of the National Institutes of Health explains what's needed to bring new technology to the forefront of research to study the brain.

Transcript

00:00

That's becoming more and more clear. The only memories you should trust are the ones you've never retrieved. That doesn't help you so much.

00:06

As soon as you recall something, you have to rewrite it, when you replace it, where it came from.

00:18

Well, such as the ability to have various kinds of electrodes that can actually

00:25

see what's happening for millions of neurons at one time, other kinds of imaging procedures, PET scans that you can walk around

00:32

with instead of being stuck in some donut where you can't really have much in the way of visual experiences,

00:38

try to understand what's going on there, new kinds of ways to sample when a neuron fires that you know

00:45

it did, ways that you could, with animals anyway, see if you could even transfer a memory from one animal to the other electrically and see

00:53

whether that would work. People are starting to learn how to do that. All of that-- complicated, demanding,

00:59

needs to bring in lots of engineers, and robotics experts, computational experts. This is going to be a big data problem, that's for sure.

01:08

And I think there's enough sense here that we're on the right moment, the cusp of an opportunity

01:16

here, to make a big push. And that's what we're doing because, without the technology, we're kind of stuck

01:22

with a big blank space here, in terms of those circuits because, right now, we have not had the ability to see what they're doing

01:30

in a real-time experiment. And that's what we need to know. I mean, what's going on with memory? What's the molecular basis of a memory?

01:38

Why is it that, when you retrieve a memory, you actually change it a little bit, and then you put it back? That's becoming more and more clear.

01:45

The only memories you should trust are the ones you've never retrieved. That doesn't help you so much. As soon as you recall something, you have to rewrite it,

01:53

when you replace it, where it came from, which means it may be slightly altered by your recollection of--

02:00

or telling the story. Fascinating. But wouldn't you like to know what is actually going on there electrically and in terms

02:08

of small molecules or large molecules? We don't know. Wouldn't that be an amazing achievement to understand that?

02:14

Would we, ultimately, even get to sort of the real Holy Grail of neurosciences-- what is consciousness?