Optogenetics and Enhancing Brain Functions
Released on 04/23/2014
(piano music)
(electronic music)
I hope to peak your curiosesity with a vision to the future
of how we might enhance brain function as we know it
and possibly change our sense of self.
If you imagine the brain as this city,
up till now it's been as if we've been looking
at the city from space.
We really haven't had the tools to do anything
beyond seeing what whole city blocks are doing,
so you can see what happens if there's a blackout,
and you lose a whole part of the city.
What you actually want to know is
what the individual components of the city,
what the people are doing, and what's the information
that's being transported from one part of the city
to the other?
Optogenetics is the ability
to manipulate individual neuronal circuits
refining our vision of the function of individual circuits,
and how they relate to different aspects
of our behavior and of our personality.
I'm gonna give you a few examples of what's been done
with this technology so far.
The basal ganglia is a part of your brain
that is damaged in Parkinson's disease.
This part of the brain contains many kinds
of neurons and they're all intermingled.
If you activate a certain subset of them with optogenetics,
you can make a rat freeze up and have difficulty walking.
If you activate a different subset,
the rats start moving faster.
They take light sensitive proteins from very humble species
such as algae that you find in a pond, and can put them
into another animal such as a rat or a mouse.
This gives you the ability to control the activity
of your brain cells just by shining light on them.
Imagine if we could use optogenetics or a similar technology
to get the input from an artificial sensor into our brain.
In principle we could not only restore function,
we could enhance our current functions.
We could give ourselves ultraviolet light detectors,
for example, the way mantis shrimps have,
or we could take an example from fruit flies
and give ourselves carbon dioxide detectors,
and then we could automatically sense our air quality.
When things go wrong with the brain
it's just so devastating.
I think one of the hopes for optogenetics is
that if it can work in humans,
that it might be used as a tool
for restoring brain function.
There's a lot of ethical issues
about enhancing your function and making yourself better.
This is what actually the whole discussion
after my Ideas Lab morphed into.
Which was not about optogenetics, or not what we might do,
but whether we should do it.
That's a really great point.
Would there be a side effect
to increasing your capacity by 20%?
It's really, really fun to fantasize about the future.
In ten years time we might all be enhanced with implants.
That's the future, and it's a future
that should be very carefully considered,
and I think what we have right now,
which is just the possibility of learning,
is actually exciting enough on its own.
(upbeat violin music)
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Optogenetics and Enhancing Brain Functions