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ambience: neuron chatter Sound file from “Listening In”
“To somehow map the behavior of individual brain cells onto the behavior of a human being. And this is certainly one of the great scientific challenges. And it’s too much for us to accomplish right now.”
We’re listening to the amplified sounds of electrical signals from human brain cells. Welcome to Pulse of the Planet Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. John Beggs is a biophysicist at Indiana University. He is studying the behavior of neurons, brain cells, in the hopes of understanding how these individual cells work together to collectively create thoughts, memories, and movement. According to John, science has a long way to go.
“So we study groups of neurons in networks in a little dish. And we can see the electrical activity going back and forth between them. And you might ask — how in the world does this have anything to do with thoughts that go on in people’s heads and our behavior. And the short answer is — I don’t know. But if I had to provide some kind of tentative answer to it, ideas that we have in our head are somehow represented by groups of brain cells going off, firing activity at the same time. And, if these groups of brain cells are in one configuration, they might represent something like Thanksgiving dinner; if they’re in another configuration, they might represent something like a holiday at the beach. The different configurations of these neurons somehow correspond to the different things that we see, or that we remember, or the motor actions that we perform. Exactly how that mapping is accomplished, we don’t know yet.”
Albert Einstein once said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be research.” To learn more about John Beggs’ research, visit his blog on our website, pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.
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