SciDi: Frontiers of the Brain – Listening In

Music; Ambience: Sound of neurons

JB: “We can only hook one of them up to a speaker at a given time, but you can imagine the cacophony that would be occurring if you hooked up everything to an electrode.”

JM: Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. We’re with John Beggs, a biophysicist at Indiana University, who studies the workings of the human brain.

JB: “Here we are down in the lab, and what I’d like to do is give you an example of what a neuron sounds like. Now neurons don’t really make noise, but what we can do is we can record from a brain cell, a neuron, in a little dish by hooking it up to an electrode. Now, we’ve got a culture of brain cells that are alive. And when they’re alive they send little voltage pulses to one another . And what you’re going to hear is sort of a hissing sound, but in the background you’ll hear like a little popping noise. And every time one of those little popping noises is going off, that’s a brain cell sending its little voltage signal. So each one of those little popping noises, like dit dit dit and then once in a while you hear a duh! Like ckkr! That’s a bunch of them when they all come together and form sort of a burst. But each one of those is one, or may be two or three different brain cells that are firing action potentials. And they can kind of talk to each other this way, by sending pulses from one to another to another. So, inside our heads, we have something like 10 to the 10th neurons and each one of them, if we could hook them up to a speaker would sound something like this, it would be enormous. It would just be this giant “chuuuuuuuu”. Pretty interesting. So I’ll fade out by zooming back into these neurons again as I turn them up.”

JM: To learn more about John Beggs’ research, check out his blog on pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

SciDi: Frontiers of the Brain - Listening In

Science Diarist John Beggs gives us a peek (and a listen) into our brains.

Air Date:10/18/2012

Scientist:

Transcript:

SciDi: Frontiers of the Brain - Listening In

Music; Ambience: Sound of neurons

JB: "We can only hook one of them up to a speaker at a given time, but you can imagine the cacophony that would be occurring if you hooked up everything to an electrode."

JM: Welcome to Pulse of the Planet's Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. We're with John Beggs, a biophysicist at Indiana University, who studies the workings of the human brain.

JB: "Here we are down in the lab, and what I'd like to do is give you an example of what a neuron sounds like. Now neurons don't really make noise, but what we can do is we can record from a brain cell, a neuron, in a little dish by hooking it up to an electrode. Now, we've got a culture of brain cells that are alive. And when they're alive they send little voltage pulses to one another . And what you're going to hear is sort of a hissing sound, but in the background you'll hear like a little popping noise. And every time one of those little popping noises is going off, that's a brain cell sending its little voltage signal. So each one of those little popping noises, like dit dit dit and then once in a while you hear a duh! Like ckkr! That's a bunch of them when they all come together and form sort of a burst. But each one of those is one, or may be two or three different brain cells that are firing action potentials. And they can kind of talk to each other this way, by sending pulses from one to another to another. So, inside our heads, we have something like 10 to the 10th neurons and each one of them, if we could hook them up to a speaker would sound something like this, it would be enormous. It would just be this giant "chuuuuuuuu". Pretty interesting. So I'll fade out by zooming back into these neurons again as I turn them up."

JM: To learn more about John Beggs' research, check out his blog on pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet's Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.