The cellular basis of behavior

Neurophysiologist Doctor Doping says about methods of studying the brain, model organisms, and a revolution in the study of nerve cells.

What are the problems faced by biologists studying the brain? Why is the study of the nervous system of invertebrates unpromising? What will help us to understand the human brain?

Flies, nematodes and their nerve cells can not be studied by physiologists favorite method: has long been developed microelectrodes that you can insert in a cell and measure its work or make it work, or off. But it turned out that there are organisms whose cells are very large. What else is important, as the nematodes, for example, these cells can recognize. The idea of identifiable neurons: one can say that this neuron number 12 in this organism, and the next day you take another snail and found the same neuron. Thus, you can examine the nervous system at the cellular level, at the same identifiable neurons.

Unfortunately, even if the cells are very large (and in Aplysia they are almost millimeter size in Klionum - less), you still can not do it on the whole animal can not, so he calmly swam and you thus recorded one, two, or more cells. Therefore, what we did, we did in the isolated brain. Then, the problem boils down to is that you can compare with the movie "The Matrix", because you have isolated the brain, and you can easily watch the proceedings of individual neurons. But then the question arises: how do we know that the brain would be doing if he was connected with the body? How to ask him information about the environment?

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Now there was a revolution in the way that will allow us to understand the vertebrate brain and even in our brain. They are based on fun things. There are bacteria and algae, seeing the light. And they have a protein that makes the channel that opens in response to light. As a result, the cell changes its activity: excited or inhibits, depending on what kind of protein. If a protein is inserted into the nerve cells of the brain, such as a mouse, then you are illuminating the brain run wild mouse, can affect these nerve cells.