Interesting interview with Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His group develops software and technologies for controlling neural circuits in order to understand how cognition and emotion arise, and to try and treat intractable brain disorders. The full interview appears at New Scientist - here is a taste:
Read the whole interview.The brain engineer: Shining a light on consciousness
- 07 March 2011 by Rowan Hooper
- For similar stories, visit the Interviews and The Human Brain Topic Guides
Neuroengineer Ed Boyden is best known for his pioneering work on optogenetics, which allows brain cells to be controlled using light. A speaker at the TED2011 conference this week, his vision, he tells Rowan Hooper, is nothing less than to understand the brain, treat neural conditions and figure out the basis of human existence.
Give us your elevator pitch.
I run the synthetic neurobiology group. We develop software, electrical and optical tools to allow people to analyse brain dynamics.Unlike a computer, the brain is made of thousands of different types of cell, and we don't know how they work. We need to be able to turn the cells on and off to see how they cooperate to implement brain computations, and how they go awry in brain disorders. What we're doing is making genetically encoded neurons that we can turn on and off with light. By shining light on these cells we can activate them and see what they do.
What brain functions will this allow you to study?
Scientists now have unprecedented abilities to perturb and record from the brain, and that's allowing us to go after complex ideas like thought and memory. Our tools will help us parse out emotion, memory, attention and consciousness. Put psychology and neuroscience together with neuroengineering, and some of the biggest questions in neuroscience become tractable.
Here is a video of Boyden speaking at Neuroinformatics 2010 in Kobe, Japan.
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