Neuroscience has never been easier! | Greg Gage | TEDxFrankfurt

hello Frankfurt's as a neuroscientist it's a huge honor to be here in Germany birthplace of many famous neuroscientists Hans Berger Franz Nissel so my talk today is not going to be covering the history of German neuroscience although I'd love to do that it's about the future of German neuroscience and so I'm going to begin by just talking about how do we study the brain is it's pretty simple you dedicate your life you spend six and a half to seven years in your master's lab just to get access to tools at a graduate school to be able to record from the brain because you know equipment is very expensive about forty thousand dollars there's only a few places within a country that you have access to these types of things and I think that's a shame because there's one out of five of us as twenty percent of the entire world has a neurological disorder and how many cures do we have for neurological diseases any one no zero we don't have any cures for a neurologic disorder yet the only way that you can start to learn study the brain is to dedicate your life and become a neuroscientist and so it's not like that in other areas of science for example in astronomy you don't need to get a PhD in astrophysics to you know get access to tools to understand a little bit about how the planets work and maybe you become interested become an astrophysicist later in life or maybe it's just you're actually making discoveries you know the hale-bopp comet was discovered by an amateur so by giving access to to more people I think science progresses further so when I was a graduate student my lab mate Tim Marzullo and myself set out to sort of change the way that neuroscience education was being taught we're trying to reach back earlier in the process to get more people interested in becoming neuroscientists and so we do various things we had one where was a paper mache Frankenstein which is an ice cream brain we had one student that would scoop out a part of the brain as scientists we call it a lesion so you would cut a part of the brain and we would transfer that through a transmodulator to another student so we had for example if you took out the motor cortex we would pass that lesion over to a student through the motor cortex controls movement so we would have the one student sort of tie their hands down and you'd go do it the same thing with the visual cortex and the amygdala and all this different areas and so we were noticing that students were starting to understand a little bit how different parts of the brain do different things which is important far removed the cool stuff we were doing in the in the lab like actually seeing how the brain works and this type of stuff so around this time we decided we want to come up with a self-imposed engineering challenge so we created an abstract the Society for Neuroscience the largest neuroscience conference in the world and we said we're gonna try to record a spike for less than a hundred dollars and you can stop by our poster and take a look and see if it works and so when people stopped by what they saw as a Tim and I being much younger versions of ourselves but showing off kind of our inventions which is like a bunch of wing nuts and and balsa wood but in the end we had an invention that allowed you to record a spike without much technology right so unbeknownst to us this is a bigger deal than what we thought it would be and it got picked up by the general nature and all of a sudden I started getting these emails about people wanting to have one of these kits that records the brain at a low cost fellow scientists to be able to show others what they're doing and so we decided to create a an organization where backyard brains we started with the prototype we had at the poster we kind of came up with this kit right here which is the SpikerBox which allows you to replace about 40,000 dollars worth of research equipment to be able to record from this the brain and so I used a lot of terminology already that maybe you're not familiar with because I just said we don't teach neuroscience that well so I'm gonna step back for a moment and describe a bit how this brain works so we have cells in the brain anyone know the names the cells of the brain neurons good neurons communicate with each other through a long process it's something that goes from the center to the hours of process using electricity and that electricity comes in a very think packet it's called a spike and it's through this spike it's like the the Euro of the brain the common currency at which all of our feelings and emotions are coming in and basically our motor outputs coming out are all passed around in this in this type of electrical currency and so what I'm going to do now is record from a living brain but I'm not going to record from my brain I'm going to record from the brains of these guys here these are South American cockroaches la Cucaracha so they are Latinos but they are having brains that are very very similar to ours if we take a look at the the Sun up here we have about a hundred billion of about eighty billion neurons in our brain but the cockroaches have about a million but the individual neuron itself is very similar if you took a slice of tissue you would be able to tell the difference if it was your brain or cockroach's brain inside the slice and then so what we're going to do now is I'm going to put the cockroach into the ice water and I'm going to anesthetize the cockroach okay so what's going on woo alright so I'm gonna put the cockroach into the ice water and we're gonna anesthetize the cockroach and then what's happening right now is that the neurons inside of his body have these little ion channels to open and close and as things get colder what happens it slows down these things that so the ion challenge gonna chill out we're gonna be able to remove one of his legs and be able to record from a neuron inside the leg all right so let's just talk about this for briefly about the experiment and we'll get into the ethics of this in a second all right so the neurons inside the legs are sending information from the leg all the way to the central nervous system okay so there there's a little neuron in each hair and as you touch the hair it's going to tell the brain of the cockroach that something is touching it so I'm gonna take off one of his legs but I want to make you feel good you guys you know this is a very green process if you remove a leg from a cockroach they're much cooler than us they're likes to regrow so here's an experiment that my my co-founder did published in PLoS ONE this this year that shows after 43 days a cockroach leg will regrow on a little nub and if you wait for the next molt you can't tell the difference between the left which was the control leg and the right that was removed so I'm gonna do that right now and I'm gonna take a cockroach and I'm gonna remove its leg and the reason why I'm gonna remove it is so that we can warm it up and record the neurons that are inside of it so I'm just let me so we found out that cutting it was actually worse and ripping it off so cockroaches are designed to be able to rip off their legs when in times of trouble so so what we're going to do now so now the leg is warming up I'm going to put a couple of pins into the leg and we're gonna be able to record the electrical activity from those neurons that they communicate with each other and I'm gonna place the pins into the leg right now and we're gonna ease drop in on one neuron talking to the brain and telling it information about touch and wind things that are kind of important to a cockroach that's that's wants to survive another day all right so without further ado let me find my my speaker here I'm going to turn is up I'm going to turn this on we're gonna listen to possibly for the first time what the brain sounds like okay I'm gonna turn this on beautiful does that sound like anything to you guys hear anything is that noise did it work so what you're hearing is that raindrops it sounds almost like so this is actually the spikes of the brain so what I can do is I can show you you guys are you guys are all neuroscientists here so we want to make sure that we prove to you that these are real and you're actually recording the spikes of a cockroach so I'm gonna do an experiment now so we can even do it without even we can just listen so you're gonna be able you're not gonna be able to see what I'm touching the leg but you're gonna be able to hear a difference and that difference is in the messages that are being sent to the brain so how are you ready so I'm have a little cockroach leg toucher do you hear that noise that's going on those are the spikes that are coming from the brain from the leg of the cockroach that neurons living in that hair as I touch it it's sending information out to the to the brain which is now sitting in here but the neuron is alive it doesn't know that it'll stay alive for about two to three days which is kind of cool though this is to summarize information this is something that a student can do even in the fifth and sixth grade to be able to understand something very important it's a long time as neuroscience to figure this out that information is encoded by spikes and the rate of the of the number of spikes per second is it encodes the information okay so you can imagine what kids look like when they actually see this for the very first time many people don't know this is eye capping inside their body and so we bring this around the country and people are just amazed by what's going on here and so what we do is we we come up with a number of experiments I'm a neuroscientist and we and we find out ways that we can sort of address some particular thing rate coding or you know neuro chemical reactions and and make them into experiments for people to work on so now I want to just do one more experiment that's gonna do on the output of the brain so we were looking at the input of the brain looking at the recording from neurons now I'm going to look at the output of the brain I need some volunteers from the audience do I have a volunteer no this is Germany come on don't do this to me all right you can come down all right and then you was there someone here that raised her hand yeah come on down as well all right round of applause [Applause] what's your name Alex you hang out here for a second you get to keep your leg what's your name Sven yeah all right so find you come over here so actually just chill for one second Netflix and chill this is about trust you got to trust us all right so I'm gonna I'm gonna have you spend yeah give me your arm yeah so I'm gonna record now from the output of your motor cortex which is right here it's gonna say there's a neuron in the BET cell largest cells that neocortex is going to cross over synapse on your spinal cord to come out to your arm and so what we're able to do is do a bio hack as it hits the arm it causes neurons to fire in your muscle fibers and we're gonna be able to amplify that and be able to listen to what your brain sounds like as amplified through the muscle fibers okay so you just give me a second here and I'm gonna plug you in and we're gonna listen to your brain are you ready so when your eyes we just squeeze your hand okay really hard it's not beautiful okay so this is your eyes this is yeah so now but we are we are clever scientists we want to move on and do something cool with that right and we'll get to you in a second right so first thing we want to do is we're going to take our technology and put it into an hour doing Yoda it's a microcontroller and so we can actually do interesting stuff with that so we if you squeeze your hand the first thing we do is make a simple brain machine interface so as you squeeze it you're causing a row of lights to turn on so your brain is controlling lights whoo all right not that interesting but let's make it more interesting so this is Germany let's do something more more appropriate so we're gonna make it we're gonna make techno music so you're now going to control this 8-bit synth so when you're ready I want you to go ahead and give it a pump alright that's cool right that's a very very important thing here alright that's cool alright so even more important than that is maybe we could do something and make it a brain machine interface so hold this with your other hand and so I'm gonna plug in a battery here and we're gonna have your brain control not only your hand on your left hand but also this robotic hand on the other side so when you're ready I want you to squeeze your hand so this is now a brain machine interface done in a very simple way that even a student would be able to sort of grasp the idea of so go really hard ok and then relax it ok so that even a student would understand how the technology can be used and actually start to use this in the real world all right so now my friend Alex come on come on over here I need you we're going to do one last experiment which is which is fun and it's about trust alright so what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna we know now that we record from your brain we're recording from here as it's in dances here it comes out here arm as you move your arm here ok so when you bring your hand out and you yeah let's do we can do this one this is fine so as you move your hand like this you have neurons here that are synapsing on your spinal cord and coming out here just like you are so when your both hands are moving both brains are kind of doing similar things and so what would happen now is that we know that we can record from the output of your brain because we saw controlling the hand what happens we took that EMG the electro myelogram and I injected it into your arm where it would have come from your brain already you would have passed your freewill over to you and you will have your brain will be controlling both your arm and you're armed and you've you know you've lost her your agency is gone okay sorry alright so we'll do an experiment and see if that works I'm gonna do another biohack here which is I'm gonna stick electrodes on your ulnar nerve which is your funny bone if you ever hit your funny bone before and what's going to happen is we're gonna take a little amplifier here and I'm gonna amplify your electrode myelogram and have it trigger your muscles here so in your all nerve runs up here is really close to the bone so it's easy to stimulate so I'm just gonna push an electrode here in here and then I'm gonna hold this here and now when I plug this to you two together you guys will become one cybernetic organism and there is okay so you guys are now one I'm going to turn up so I want you to look how to look away so you're gonna look at what just relax that hand and whenever you want to you can just slowly start you can just give it a few pumps you want to get up to there with that right there you go but not too much okay just chill alright so we'll do it again I'm gonna trip a little bit more so okay you start you feel that okay alright so so okay so you're starting to see something here okay this is called threshold all right so this is a cyber trip just a little bit more are you comfortable with that so when you want to go ahead and alright so now so you have lost the freewill of this hand so go ahead and do it again so know what happened now so your brain is firing action potentials heading down your spinal cord coming out to your arm we're picking it up and sticking in where your brain would to come out there so what would happen now if you just relax your hand let it fall to the ground like you have no yeah what would happen now if I took my freewill away from you could we move his hand you think what do you think yes okay anyone say no not good no I won thank you so we're gonna do an experiment now so just you keep it relaxed I'm gonna move my hand move her hands as much as I want and nothing's happened why not her brain isn't engaged right so go ahead really quick make sure it still works every experiment needs to control all right so let's turn that off let's have a round of applause for our volunteers here especially you Alex you guys can keep those you keep those perfect all right and I'm just gonna just summarize by by telling you that this is something that that we started a number of years ago and we're starting to see the fruits of that labor we already have you know middle school kids that are winning science fair awards and doing new experiments that are kind of pushing the boundaries of science and just last week I was at the Society for Neuroscience the largest neuroscience conference again and a young student who is a graduate student in a research lab is presenting his first poster and stopped by to let us know that it was because of this organization in our SpikerBox that he did in high school that encouraged him to become a neuroscientist so I ask you here in Germany to tell your friends and family and colleagues that are in the education business that you saw something very cool at TEDx Frankfurt and that you should be pushing neuroscience into into the early education as well so thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 10,992

Rating: 4.9888268 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Germany, Science (hard), Biology, Biotech, Brain, Neuroscience

Id: kaKdpRQOtbE

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2017