For centuries doctors and scientists
have tried to unravel the mysteries
of the human brain. How is it organized?
What are the areas that regulate different mental functions, and how are they all integrated to produce our independent psychological knowledge?
The prefrontal cortex is celebrated as a logical abode. The motor cortex regulates and directs movement. The somatosensory cortex and the parietal lobes control our perception of the physical world.
The temporal lobe processes memories, language, and emotions The occipital lobe processes and collects visual information.
And the cerebellum helps execute the commands of our body. Scientists have examined the brain through the lens of our beliefs about what it means to be human.
So when we look at parts of the brain, trying to figure out what they are doing, scientists often use their theories about what makes the human mind, and some of those ideas can be traced back to Plato.
Recent research on common categories of brain functions, such as memory, shows incredible amounts of activity that exceed different parts of the brain so much so that a simple map and its solid categories lose their meaning.
The way we think the mind does not go well with the functions of different brain systems.
These types of divisions are very independent and it is probably best to try to look at the brain and find out what its organizational features are without attracting these culturally sensitive classes, which can be brainwashed. Russell Poldrack did just that.
In his Stanford University lab, he takes a calculation approach to understand the planning features of our minds. If you have people.
Who does a lot of different mental tasks that are different from the mental tasks that we think they do, let's collect data from a variety of activities and ask the data what kind of structure it is.
Poldrack's lab used machine learning to try to distinguish emotional activity related to memory. But instead of simply mapping into memory centers, the data associated with the normal construction of functions for which we do not yet have names.
What has shown us in some cases is that the things we once thought we were measuring the same thing do not seem to measure the same thing at all. I think we need to rethink the way we think brain functions.
Within neuroscience, there is a broad consensus that the brain is a calculator and we need to understand what mathematics does and that we must ultimately be able to understand the functioning of the brain according to those calculations.
Part of the challenge is that we do not have the right language to describe those numbers without numbers. It, therefore, raises the question of whether we will eventually have brain models capable of predicting brain activity, but which will not be able to provide comprehensible human interpretations as well.
Deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia lies a strange flower in the world. This is the place of Rafflesia arnoldii.
It is better known as the “corpse flower” because it smells like rotten meat to attract flies. It is the largest flower in the world, the size, and weight of a small child. But the irony is not limited to that.
Rafflesia is not just a flower it is a parasite. They need a part or all of their nutrients and water from another plant. As a result, we often find external genes in the genome of a parasitic plant often from a host.
One of the ideas is that infected plants steal the host as a weapon to make them a better parasite. Liming Cai is the latest in a long line of biologists trying to trace the infamous Rafflesia genome.
Biologists struggled because Rafflesia genes have repetitive elements called transposons, known as jumping genes because of their ability to cut and attach themselves from time to time.
Many living things silence these elements, but Rafflesia is not a living thing. These repetitive elements cause many problems for the scientist who is trying to assemble the genomes because it is basically the same as putting a jigsaw puzzle, but each piece is the same.
This year, with the help of a team of bioinformatics, Cai successfully created a modified Rafflesia genome. His findings were far more shocking than what biologists had expected.
There are a few things that happen here that have disturbed my mind from the beginning and made us reconsider what defines a plant.
So all plants have the same set of genes. In Rafflesia, we have found that it has lost almost half of the genetics of preserved plants, which is the result of Cai records recording and finding that 90% of Rafflesia's genes contain repetitive DNA, such as transposons. That is very unusual.
No one knows why, but the answer may change our understanding of parasite genomics. With the advancement of genome sequencing technology, we can explore all the strange branches of the tree of life how laws can be broken by all sorts of truly creative techniques.
Life is varied and natural. At the beginning of the 20th century, sleep became a popular topic for researchers.
The device of choice was the newly invented electroencephalograph, or EEG, a device that measures the electrical activity of the brain.
This approach revealed a lot of understanding, but also stopped the bias in studies: that sleep is a state of the senses, and its purpose and structure are found in the brain.
Everyone has thought that sleep is mental, brain, brain. This is a famous quote by Alan Hobson, a brilliant sleep scientist who makes a huge contribution to the field But he ignores the fact that we are not the brain.
Tobler noticed that the cockroaches were asleep.
Since then, we have learned that simple creatures, with their tiny brain and brain, also sleep. And recently, the discovery has completely changed the narrative. This is a hydra. It is one of the easiest ways to live animals.
Instead of the brain, hydras have a nerve network, the most basic sensory system in nature.
This year, a team of Japanese scientists showed that hydras sleep. These tiny freshwater creatures are living proof that sleep came before the brain. But if sleep has not changed and what does the brain do, what does it do for you?
More and more scientists are looking at internal tissues and asking how the body can affect the brain and how the brain can directly affect the body in terms of sleep control My lab, the current theory is that there are certain conditions the brain can do.
fix it. And in conjunction with any damage that has been done, sleep can reduce the ability to regenerate so that these regions can begin to find that solution.
So the idea is that when you are asleep, you are using less energy, but the energy you are using, you are using it in a different way than you are supporting functions that you would not be able to support when you woke up.
Hydras research is the latest in a growing body of evidence that sleep first evolved to help regulate the body and improve repair, and only later did it take on brain-related functions.
I believe that sleep and metabolism are intertwined. So that will be tomorrow.
