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So, I want now to describe to you what I call the blossoming of, of the brain in
the world. There is a phenomena today as I mentioned
at the beginning that the world is now full of brain interests.
So, I call it the blossoming of the worldwide and these red spots all over
our physical buildings for brain research that are being now being built, or some
of them are already done. For example, here in Portugal, there is a
beautiful brain center. The [UNKNOWN] center for brain research.
In New York they build now a new one. London just now, they started to build a
new brain center. And also in Jerusalem Just to show you
the beauty of it. So, Lord Norman Foster is now building a
building at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem here.
And you can see the beauty of this building, so it will look something like
that, it is almost final. A big building, a huge building actually
with 30 laboratories with a facade that looks like the brain from the outside.
So, nerve cells and networks. We'll talk a lot about the networks.
And from the inside, it will be built from such a thing.
And if you sit in this lab from within you will look throughout.
And you will see, as if you see it in the brain.
You will see all this network that, that really are, are the basic structure of
the brain. So, this is just one example of the fact
that there are buildings in the world now, because we feel and that's why we do
this course, we feel that we need to understand the brain, we really need to
understand the brain if we want to understand not only ourselves, but also
diseases. I want just to also say a word about the
structure of such brain centers unlike classically where we thought the brain
belongs to biologists so to speak and only biologists can understand the brain.
We now understand that actually, the people that will understand the brain
will be the Leonardo da Vinci's of the brain.
There will be a very renaissance type of researchers that will be able and will
have to master many, many fields. They will have to master theory, physics,
and mathematics, and computer sciences, they will have to master some aspects of
diseases, neurological, and psychiatric diseases.
They will have to master anatomy and circuit structure of the brain.
So there are all these, actually all the brain centers that I mentioned before are
all built around this kind of a conceptual framework for how to study the
brain in a modern way. Especially, and I want to, to highlight
this, we're going to do a little bit of mathematics in this course, the
theoretical aspect, the computation aspect as a foundation for such centers
is very fundamental. We don't think that we can connect the
level of cells and synapses and network and diseases all these levels, without
some theoretical foundation. So, the theory is really fundamental
today to understanding as complex a physical system as it is.
And so, the student, the new student, the neuroscience student, will have to study
all these fields. He will have to know a little bit about
cognitive psychology would have to know about neurology, it would have to know
about physics and engineering, it will be a new kind of student.
Its not going to be so particular and so somewhat limited as the researchers of
the 20th century, this is the 21st century brain research.
And so I wanted to introduce this to you. [COUGH] Some examples of the drama of the
brain in, in, in, in this period of time, you may have heard about the Allen
Institute. Paul Allen build huge, fantastic, amazing
institute in Seattle focusing about the mapping of the genetic manifestation, or
the genes that are being expressed in the brain.
Beautiful studies, very important for humanities.
Janelia farm is another kind of industrial scale brain research just near
Washington, DC. The Janelia farm, very interesting place,
very huge place and very prolific place. The Human Brain Project, I'm part of it,
you will hear a lot and I think the 6th or 7th meeting, you will hear a lot about
the Human Brain Project, actually lesson number seven as you can see here.
So I'm not going to say much about this, but this is this 1,000,000,000 Euro
declaration of Europe recently, that they want to focus about the brain, in some
particular way that I will describe later on.
And very, very recently as I started saying, President Obama announced the
brain activity map initiative, meaning that they want to develop methods to
record the activity, electrical activity of millions maybe even of billions of
neurocells in the brain simultaneously. And later, when we should understand
about the signals in the brain you will understand why this initiative is
important. Let's go to the complexity of the brain.
[COUGH] Just to tell you how it is difficult to understand it, why is it so
difficult in principal to understand it, and why theory is so fundamental.
So, if we look at the brain you can discuss the brain at the level of
proteins and genes, which underline any cell activity, of course also nerves
cells. So this the scale of nanometers very very
small scale. If you want to understand the genome, the
nerves themselves, the connection between the nerves you start to climb in the
resolution. Up to the level of even meters, because
eventually you want to understand behavior like I am behaving now and
that's the scale of meters. So, basically neuroscience needs somehow
find the way to, to connect, understanding at the level of genome,
genes, chromosomes, and proteins to the level of behavior and diseases which is
at this level. So we have to go through all these
levels, from genes to behavior. Step by step, not to jump from one
another. But to connect them one after the other
through some kind of a method, and that's why we need theory.
Because we don't believe that you can really do this jump of connecting levers
without some framework, systematic framework a language.
And we believe the mathematics is the correct language to describe the
different levels. Each with their particular mathematics,
but eventually with the same tools that will be able to really connect what
happens here, to here, to here, to here until you get a particular behavior, like
language, like moving my arm, like seeing or like becoming sick.
So, mathematics has found is fundamental and the complexity of the system is
particularly difficult because of all the levels of descriptions.
And today, as you may know there are neuroscientists that sit here, and study
this level. Neuroscientists that study neurons study
at this level. Neuroscientists who study cognitive
psychology are sitting in this level, and, and, and neurologists are sitting in
this level, so to speak and treat diseases.
So, so, this is one of the most fundamental, difficult issue in the
brain, and that's why we do. We believe that everything will
eventually come down, boil down to systematic theory about all these levels
and the connection between them. So let's stop here for a second.