Increasingly, neuroscientists believe that the key to understanding how the brain works lies in its over-all neural circuitry, and the way that widely separated brain regions communicate through the long-range projection of nerve fibres. In this view, mental disorders result from the shorting-out or disruption of the larger circuit wiring of the brain—and it is in defining and describing those circuit connections that Deisseroth’s innovations promise to be especially helpful.

Christof Koch, at the Allen Institute, likens Deisseroth to Galileo, whose early improvements of the telescope afforded a huge advance in our understanding of the cosmos. Even so, like Galileo’s telescope, which opened up the immensity of space, Deisseroth’s technologies have helped reveal how little we know about the brain—what Koch calls “by far the most complex piece of organized matter in the known universe.”

Koch says, “Over the past four hundred years, since the discovery of the telescope, each successive generation of astrophysicists has realized that the universe is still bigger than the previous generation thought. So it is with the brain. Each generation of neuroscientists turns up more complexity, more hidden layers.”

Read original article


Tags: