What we'll learn about the brain in the next century | Sam Rodriques
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2018
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
In this imaginative talk, neurobiologist Sam Rodriques takes us on a thrilling tour of the next 100 years in neuroscience. He envisions strange (and sometimes frightening) innovations that may be the key to understanding and treating brain disease -- like lasers that drill tiny holes in our skulls and allow probes to study the electrical activity of our neurons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features synthetic neurobiologist Sam Rodriguez, recorded live at TEDx Bacon Street, 2017. |
| 0:10.0 | I want to tell you guys something about neuroscience. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm a physicist by training. |
| 0:15.0 | About three years ago, I left physics to come and try to understand how the brain works. |
| 0:20.0 | And this is what I found. |
| 0:21.7 | Lots of people are working on depression. |
| 0:23.8 | And that's really good. |
| 0:24.7 | I mean, depression is something that we really want to understand. |
| 0:27.3 | But here's how you do it. |
| 0:28.5 | You take a jar and you fill it up about halfway with water. |
| 0:33.0 | And then you take a mouse and you put the mouse in the jar. |
| 0:36.6 | Okay? |
| 0:37.3 | And the mouse swims around for a little while. |
| 0:39.7 | And then at some point, the mouse gets tired and decides to stop swimming. |
| 0:44.0 | And when it stops swimming, that's depression. |
| 0:47.9 | Okay? |
| 0:49.6 | And I'm from theoretical physics, so I'm used to people making very sophisticated mathematical |
| 0:56.1 | models to precisely describe physical phenomena. So when I saw that this is the model for depression, |
| 1:01.8 | I thought to myself, oh my God, we have a lot of work to do. But this is a kind of general |
| 1:07.7 | problem in neuroscience. So for example, take emotion. |
| 1:12.1 | Lots of people want to understand emotion. |
| 1:14.9 | But you can't study emotion in mice or monkeys |
... |
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