And the This week we kick-start naked neuroscience opening your mind to the nervous system.

You can subscribe to this new monthly podcast on iTunes and via the

Naked Scientists website. I'm Hanukrichlow and we're about to take a journey

through the nervous system finding out how individual bits of nerve cells process information,

how whole brain circuits work, and how these findings are unlocking new treatments for patients. We are currently in the middle of a radical change in terms of how we investigate the brain.

Over the past few decades there has been a lot of progress at the top end of our understanding in psychology and brain imaging

seeing which areas of the brain light up when we do a particular task and also there's been a great deal of progress at the bottom end in

terms of our understanding of genes and molecules in the brain. But there's been a real gap in our

understanding in the middle. So there's been a real gap in our understanding in the middle.

So there's been an inability to connect what's happening on the level of behavior

with what's going on at the molecular and genetic level.

That level of understanding is the level of neural circuits. We speak

with somebody who's been trying to fill this gap by zooming in, looking at brain cells or

nerve cells or neurons, and finding out how just the branches of these cells,

the dendrites,

computes input signals.

I'm Michael Hoiseau, I work at University College London.

Our work shows that single neurons can solve

interesting computational problems. The current dogma has been that

information processing is carried up primarily by thousands or millions of neurons

working at the network level.

And we've shown that the dendrites of neurons,

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