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How do we understand something so complex as the brain by examining it piecemeal? Especially when we are trying to integrate a multilayered phenomenon. An article in this week's New York Science Times by Sandra Blakeslee points out that some brain events occur in fractions of milliseconds while others, like long-term memory formation, can take days or weeks. One can study molecules, ion channels, single neurons, functional areas, circuits, oscillations and chemistry. There are neural stem cells and mechanisms of plasticity, which involve how the brain changes with experience or recovers from injury. As we look at all of these elements we are seeing the trees but not the forest.
To put it more bluntly, here is what we are up against.
"Stretched flat, the human neocortex, the center of our higher mental functions, is about the size and thickness of a formal dinner napkin. With 100 billion cells, each with 1,000 to 10,000 synapses, the neocortex makes roughly 100 trillion connections and contains 300 million feet of wiring packed with other tissue into a one-and-a-half-quart volume in the brain." Adding confusion to complexity, there are six very similar layers. Within these layers, different regions carry out vision, hearing, touch, the sense of balance, movement, emotional responses and every other feat of cognition. More mysterious yet, there are 10 times as many feedback connections, from the neocortex to lower levels of the brain, as there are feed-forward or bottom-up connections.
Most neuroscientists are convinced the mind is in no way separate from the brain. We have, in general, found a physical basis for all our thoughts, aspirations, language, sense of consciousness, moral beliefs and everything else that makes us human. All of this arises from interactions among billions of ordinary cells.
So where do we go next to get the big picture and begin to see the forest rather that just the trees? Our colleagues at Brain Waves suggest that one way is through the Human Brain Project since this NIH sponsored endeavor focuses on the integration of information from the level of the gene to the level of behavior through neuroinformatics.
In the Times article, Blakeslee points out that current science is like a child who takes apart his father's watch, they have dissected the brain and now have almost all the pieces laid out before them. There are thousands of clues about what makes the brain tick. This reminds me of Leonardo daVinci who studied anatomy to understand the details of our physiology but he was also not bound by these specifics and he could just as easily abstract to take a more encompassing and creative perspective on science and humanity.
11:14:46 PM 
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