Ed Boyden builds the tools and technologies that help researchers think about and treat the brain, an organ we still know surprisingly little about. When it comes to how our brains make decisions, form emotions, and exhibit consciousness, there is still a lot we can learn.But just as fascinating as the tools Boyden and his team build is the way in which they build them. Boyden employs a number of methods to design more useful tools, such as thinking backwards from the problem, hiring eclectic talent, practicing a particular type of meditation, waking long before dawn, or just trying the opposite of what’s already been attempted.Would emulating the brain require emulating the entire body? Is consciousness fundamental to the universe, or is it actually just an illusion? Does a certain disharmony in thought lead to creativity? Why don’t people don’t feel comfortable talking about their brains? And why is it so hard for us to be empathetic with one another? Listen to this engaging and brain-stimulating conversation with Tyler to hear his perspective.
TYLER COWEN: I’m here today with Ed Boyden, who is a famous neuroscientist at MIT. There is much more to say about him, but he’ll do some of that explaining himself.Before we get to what you’ve done, let me just toss out a few general questions that the audience might be interested in. If I were to read all of the good popular books on brain science, what is it that I’m still most likely not to understand?ED BOYDEN: I think something that people don’t appreciate is how little we know about the brain. If you think about brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and epilepsy, basically none of these can be cured, and the treatments — if they do exist — are very partial and have a lot of side effects.Similarly, we don’t actually have theories — detailed knowledge — enough to make predictive, interesting models, for example, of how we form emotions, of how we make decisions.I sometimes half-jokingly say we should write a book about the brain called Ignorance: What We Don’t Know about the Brain. I’m not sure how many copies we’d sell, though.COWEN: If I think about mental illness, it seems that it’s hard to find chemical correlates for mind states that would normally be counted as mentally ill. Is that part of the puzzle? How does mental illness show up in the brain? Do we know anything about that?BOYDEN: This is a big mystery. There are two issues which really need to be addressed. One is that mental illnesses, for the most part, are defined by the symptoms. I have a lack of appetite, I feel apathy, I don’t feel pleasure in things that I normally do take pleasure in.Then the chemical side is also a bit murky. If we think about pharmaceuticals that treat brain conditions — it’s bathing the brain, this complexly wired circuit, in a substance. So of course, it’s going to affect parts of the brain that you want to change as well as parts of the brain that you’d rather leave alone.I think part of the problem is, we need to define brain conditions in terms of the underlying wiring and circuity. Most of the technologies we build are oriented around two classes of approach. One is, can we make maps of the brain — detailed maps of the wiring, if you will, of the brain.The other is, can you watch and control the high-speed dynamics of the brain. In other words, can you watch the brain in action and then perturb it so that you can heal the brain by speaking the natural language of the brain, which is electrical pulses.COWEN: Let’s get to optogenetics, which you just mentioned. If I understand this correctly, you can, in essence, turn on lights, control a mouse, and make the mouse run in circles. Is that an oversimplified account of what you do that’s correct?BOYDEN: [laughs] I think it’s important to point out the goal. The goal here is that, if you could precisely control neural activity, maybe you could actually repair a brain or discover the principles of how to repair the brain, which could inspire better drugs or better noninvasive brain stimulation methods.What we do is, to speak the natural language of the brain, which is electrical pulses, we borrow from the natural world, effectively, tiny solar panels that exist in bacteria and plants and other small —COWEN: Those are archaeans, right? Or algae?BOYDEN: Yes, algae have these. Archaea have them. They make these little molecules — proteins — that convert light to electricity. We transplant them into brain cells, and then we can control the electrical pulses of brain cells with light.COWEN: What’s the delivery method for the transplant? That’s viral?BOYDEN: This is where we got really lucky. It turns out that these solar panels are actually proteins, and proteins are encoded by DNA. So you can use all these tricks from gene therapy to deliver the gene into the brain, and then it’ll make the product, this little protein-encoded solar panel.COWEN: What are the activities right now you can make the mouse do?BOYDEN: We’ve given the technologies to thousands and thousands of research groups at this point. People have been using the techniques to study even very complex things like memory or aggression or complex emotions.One of my favorite studies was done by Dayu Lin and David Anderson and colleagues. They took a molecule that lets you activate neurons with blue light, and they put it into a region of the brain — deep, deep in the brain — and then they implanted an optical fiber connected to a laser and aimed the optical fiber at this cluster of cells.Now, what happened? When they turned on the laser, these cells were activated, and this was done in mice. The mice would become aggressive or violent. They would attack whatever was next to them, even if it was a rubber glove.What I like about these technologies is, we can start to ask questions about why does the brain do what it does. What is the nature of something like a decision or an emotion, or even something like aggression or violence, where it has ethical implications?...
...MUCH MORE, including audio
