Groundbreaking Discoveries About The Human Brain and Our Neurons

R Gap 11b rhap 11b a r h gap 11b how do you pronounce this whole wonderful person this is Anton and this unusual word that you see right here is probably one of the most important genes in our bodies the gene that makes us different from every other species on the planet and it's something that we've only discovered a few years ago and this is going to be one of the topics we're discussing today because I actually wanted to focus on some of the new discoveries and some of the new achievements in regards to understanding and research of human brain there have been some really intriguing discoveries in just the last year or so with some of these discoveries taking us a little bit closer to the ultimate question of what exactly is intelligence how is it formed and who are we right who are you who am I I mean we obviously have a name but what's behind that name what's behind our identity now none of these questions are going to be answered in this particular video because in this case this is actually a long series of videos I'm going to be making for many many months and many many years with some of the older videos already in the description below but let's start right here with this unusual microchip a microchip that was able to create a network that the site is referred to as dish brain it's a collection of approximately 800 000 neurons directly connected to a silicon technology something we will refer to as synthetic biological intelligence SBI with the result of all of this being a brain a silicon brain that's able to play a tiny game of Pawn that you see right there with all this being a kind of a fusion between living tissue and silicon technology first our experiment showing us synthetic biological intelligence but what exactly is happening here and what exactly does this mean and represent or I guess more importantly what is this for well here we have this microchip that's able to produce lirious inputs connected to a relatively simple software that has a relatively simple machine learning algorithm able to play the game of pong but on top of this the scientists were able to grow a combination of mice and human embryonic neuron cells created using a relatively known technique or the neuronal cells are grown from various stem cells and are then allowed to attach themselves and grow on top of some sort of surface in this case the surface was that microchip which in this case allows the microelectrodes from the Silicon chip to then activate and stimulate the neurons by providing them with sensory input and the purpose here was to essentially provide a relatively simple input and simple feedback mechanism to all allow the neurons to grow in a certain way in order to improve the game of fall over time the software part was coming from the microchip and from the software attached to the microchip but the neurons were growing independently with the strength of the connection becoming different over time even without any kind of reward or punishment the neurons would activate in order to provide feedback to the microchip which would then move the pedal on a screen and eventually these neurons would even sort of predict where they think the paddle would be in order to try to conserve energy and to try to fire as little as possible and as you can see the results were kind of good it wasn't really missing the ball it was able to move the paddle on a screen and it will learn in the process but how does this help us in terms of science well the scientists here believe that these types of systems can now be used to for example test various drugs today it's actually really difficult to test drugs on actual human neurons mostly because of various ethical reasons and because it can be potentially dangerous but by connecting it to this system the scientists can then directly absorb the effects of various drugs on actual neurons by seeing how it changes the performance playing pong or really anything else for that matter and so this does provide us with a direct observation of effects of various chemicals various types of biological substances and even things like alcohol on neurons themselves and that's actually going to be the next step for this particular study because the scientists want to see what happens if you get this particular brain a little bit drunk although maybe colony of the brain is not appropriate it's not a true brain as a matter of fact it's not aware it's not conscious it's an interconnection of 800 000 neurons directly merged with the machine and so in the next few months possibly within a year we're going to find out what happens when you get this particular machine drunk definitely looking forward to hearing more about this so that's just one of the first new unusual discoveries unusual achievements we have more so as I previously mentioned in order to create various types of human neurons that can be used for science the most common method that's at acceptable and is used by pretty much everyone involves stem cells and in this case many of these stem cells will then be grown into something that's known as organoids a miniature version of an organ the scientists are trying to study this particular science took off back in 2013 and it has since become extremely important for a lot of types of biomedical research you might want to check out one of the previous videos that describes this in a little bit more detail with some of the most groundbreaking discoveries and so naturally to study the brain the scientists would create a kind of a miniature brain organoid here's the one that was created in Harvard back in 2019 but these are not true brains and they're also kind of limited in what they can do or what they can teach us about various types of disorders that the scientists are trying to study for example in order to understand some kind of a psychiatric disorder or some kind of a brain problem such as schizophrenia or Autism organoids are not super helpful they barely do anything for us you do have to actually introduce this into a much more complex organism such as a human in order to learn anything as a matter of fact a lot of these disorders are uniquely human and so these little guys unfortunately don't help us much but there's still a way to study all this using mice and using lab rats but also using human brain and the scientists recently found a way to do this by using human brain organoids and actually introducing them into various rats and this particular technique has been tried before but only in all the rats this time they use these organoids and introduce them into extremely young rats basically newborn rats through a surgical procedure and in this case because the brain itself was not mature yet it was able to connect to the introduced tissue eventually developing and maturing by mixing two tissues together but the neurons eventually becoming regular neurons and becoming part of the brain's Network and this by itself is already a huge achievement it means that the scientists found a successful way to study problems with human neurons by introducing them into rats and by assessing the effects in lab conditions something that's practically impossible to do in humans but something that although rats can definitely help us with and in this study they even already tried this with at least one major disorder by introducing neurons derived from patients with what's known as Timothy's syndrome a severe genetic disease caused by a genetic mutation that very often results in early death and excessive autistic symptoms and in this case they already had some of the few results from this particular study the neurons from rats that had Timothy syndrome neurons had very different shapes were much simpler formed very different synaptic connections and overall were a lot less active compared to the ones from normal human brain a discovery that could not be made in any other way and a discovery that hopefully one day might help us find a way to treat this condition and to actually help children survive this and potentially even recover from it completely which means that this is an extremely important and very successful technique that's now going to help us understand human brain even more and help us study a lot of different disorders that would be otherwise inaccessible to us so definitely a pretty huge achievement for neurology and for Neuroscience but this kind of takes us to that new study that I briefly mentioned in the beginning the study of that Gene was an unusual name the gene that makes are neurons so different from a lot of other neurons the gene that we believe makes human brain completely unique and very different from every other brain including the brains of chimpanzees or other apes and in order to study this Gene the scientists once again employed soundies brain organoids and genetic manipulation in order to see what happens to various human neurons if you were to knock out this Gene and its Action Now intriguing in a similar study from I think about couple years ago another team tried to introduce these genes into a brain of a typical chimp well not the living Chimp in this case once again an organ annoyed you can find that particular study in the description below as well and the question here was what exactly is going to happen to the brain cells coming from the chimp would they become more complex would they start increasing in size and start to develop more complexity just like the human neurons or would nothing really work well the study did discover that there was a dramatic increase in overall activity and in overall proliferation and size making the cells appear a lot more human-like and a lot less treatment-like potentially explaining why our brains are so much more complex but in this new organoid study they want to do the opposite they took the human organoids once again created from various stem cells and decided to knock out that Gene to see what actually happens and the result was kind of what the scientists expected the number of stem cells was reduced and the overall brain actually appeared more like the brain from various chimpanzee studies which makes this a pretty groundbreaking discovery it really shows us that one Thai engine inside our brains inside our neurons might have completely changed the evolution of our species or in other words it's at one particular Gene that makes our brains very different from the chimps brains removing the Gene and you basically become a chimp okay maybe a little bit too extreme but it seems that way because a lot of these neurons and a lot of these organelles resembled shape like formations and since we know that this Gene definitely controls the growth and proliferation of various neurons and also contributes to the folding of our brains in this case it definitely seems to cause the complexity present in humans but not in other primates and other apes and more specifically here the scientists think that it very likely happened sometime after the Divergence of chimpanzees and humans but very likely way before the Divergence from neanderthals suggesting that our cousins neanderthals very likely had very similar genes and thus as we know already very likely possess just as much metal capacity so definitely super exciting discoveries and the discoveries that take us just a step closer in how helping us understand who we are what makes us human what creates our intelligence and basically what makes us not chance but because these are very early studies there are going to be more discoveries in the future and potentially maybe mistakes mistakes that need to be corrected or maybe even additional discoveries that we still cannot imagine because when it comes to the brain there is so much more tolerate actually there's one more thing I wanted to mention before we end the video I discovered from this paper you can find in the description and in this case it's a reminder that we still don't really know what most parts of our brain even do or more specifically we know a little bit about them but definitely not everything with the main focus of this study being the region of the brain known as cerebellum you can see it right there in red and for the longest time we always knew that in this particular region seems to control the movements of our body but apart from the movements it was also believed to be responsible for various types of positive and negative emotional experiences in other words it made an unusual connection between I guess physical movements but also emotional Memories the scientists believe it's maybe because of some kind of an evolutionary Advantage for example remembering dangers and being able to react to those dangers almost right away and vice versa possibly happy events which might help us react in a certain way as well and when it comes to various emotional Memories the two other regions that are always believed to be responsible for this are hippocampus and the region known as amygdala and so in this study the scientists wanted to discover if the cerebellum was responsible for improving or possibly influencing the formation of emotional memories but in the end the discovery suggested that it seems to have a lot of effect as a matter of fact it seems to be a very important component of the network directly responsible for improving the storage of various emotional information it seemed to be receiving information from a lot of other regions and was then sending this information to other regions in order to consolidate the memories which sort of makes sense I mean this is technically the fight or flight response being able to react almost instantly to some kind of an emotional experience and react to it almost right away and evolutionary it would make sense but today the scientists want to study this because of various types of problems and thesaurus such as for example PTSD when it comes to traumatic experiences all this goes through cerebellum as well and then starts to produce a lot of undesirable Behavior as you can probably imagine especially because of the charity event I'm running right now I'm kind of struggling with this myself right now the trauma that our family experienced a few months ago they're directly influenced a lot of my personal behavior I'm obviously slowly working through it but it will take some time in these memories once established become extremely difficult to unlearn and the main Discovery from this paper really suggests that the more dramatic the memory that you have the more likely cerebellum was responsible for it very unusual kind of unexpected but in terms of The evolutionary perspective I guess it makes sense seeing a dangerous animal in the wild experiencing a negative ocean and reacting to it physically almost right away was extremely important for a lot of our ancestors not so much now I guess but unfortunately in modern day life it does result in some major depressive episodes and quite a lot of undesirable Behavior but by knowing that it seems to come from cerebellum we might actually find a way to somehow treat these disorders and to somehow reprogram our brains from producing a lot of negative experiences to making them either neutral or more positive but I guess where this leads we don't really know just yet it's a relatively recent study and a relatively recent discovery but it does highlight the fact that we basically know so little about our brain even today not to mention other brains or intelligence in general that we barely understand at all and that of course includes artificial intelligence and we're going to be discussing in some of the future videos specifically focusing on what we know and more on what we don't know and our misconceptions about what AI actually is more about this in some of the future videos thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has learned about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else support by joining General membership or by buying the one full percent t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] foreign foreign foreign

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 343,260

Keywords: brain, human brain, neurons, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, brain vs universe, brain cell vs the universe, brain structure, consciousness, cosmic web, neuronal network, neural net, flow of information, axons, web, brain and universe, neuron discovery, biology, human neurons, memory, engram, memory formation, google brain map, connectomics, perceptron, arc gene, arc protein, capsid, campana cell, arhgap11b

Id: iGdFh3ENjzc

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022