TRANSPARENT BRAIN

The current issue of The New Yorker chronicles the efforts of Karl Deisseroth to understand how the brain works. Mr. Deisseroth is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford. And he has led groundbreaking efforts as he develops new tools to help us understand the mechanics of how our brains function. A link to John Colapinto’s article.

Part of the difficulty in understanding our brains is a convoluted cause and effect. We do not have a specific enough tool or technique to understand that specific areas of the brain control specific emotions, reactions, thoughts, etc. There is too much overlap which makes our understanding very general. So Mr. Deisseroth’s efforts have pioneered methods with which to reduce the fuzzy picture that we have or how our minds work.

To solve this problem, he created a transparent brain.  That is, he developed the technology and the technique so as to make a physically transparent brain. His thinking was that if he could see the brain transparently, then this tool would help him to visualize the brain with greater insight. With all sorts of new approaches, he devised a method to remove the fats and water, leaving only the tangle of nerves. Once this assembly was then suspended in a clear hydrogel liquid, he had a physical three dimensional transparent model of the brain. He calls this an endoskeleton, with the nerves serving as the skeletal elements.

We saw this once before. In a previous post, we saw how building forensics engineers were using lasers to construct a transparent three dimensional image of existing buildings. As we saw in that instance, the transparency helped them to understand how the building worked to very significant degree.

Increasingly, neuroscientists feel the need to understand entire neural connectivity. And Mr. Deisseroth’s brain clarification tool will help them with this goal. With these two examples as starters, is transparency now the new paradigm? Will transparency serve as a new mode of thinking with which humanity’s problems are more easily solved? Who knows.

What I do know is that I will continue to make my transparent drawings of lowly buildings. While others employ fantastical scientific techniques, I’ll continue to sit here with a pencil, sketch book, and watercolors. And so it goes.