Section of a part of the mouse brain involved in stress and anxiety, imaged to visualize corticotrophin releasing hormone receptor type 2 (green), channelrhodopsin2 (blue), and immediate early gene fosB (red). Photo credit: Todd Anthony.

David Anderson is Professor of Biology at Cal Tech and an "investigator" at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Anderson talks in this piece about the problems with current psychiatric medications - that they target chemistry in the whole brain. He believes they can target treatments more precisely to limit side effects and actually do what they are intended to do.

The following is a "lay description" of the work Anderson and his students do at Cal Tech:

What are "emotions," and how are they represented in the brain? What parts of the brain are affected in emotional disorders such as depression, anxiety or PTSD? Do all animals have emotions? If not, when and how did emotions evolve?

The answer to each of these important questions is that we simply do not know. The study of the brain science of emotion is in its relative infancy, yet emotional and psychiatric disorders continue to take an enormous toll on human society. Current treatments for emotional disorders, such as Prozac and related drugs, act very non-specifically on the brain and cause many undesirable side effects. They also can take many weeks to work, and in some patients never have any effect at all, or make symptoms worse. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has not developed any fundamentally new treatments for psychiatric disorders in at least two decades. In order to develop more powerful and specific therapies for such disorders, we need to first define the functional neural circuitry that underlies specific emotional behaviors, so that we can understand how it can be adversely affected.

Brain-scanning studies in humans have provided powerful and impressive images of "hot spots" of activity that occur during emotional responses. But which of these hot spots represents the actual cause of an emotional response, and which of them represents a reaction to the response? We cannot tell. In order to distinguish cause from effect, it is necessary to experimentally alter the activity of brain circuits in a highly specific, temporally controlled manner, and determine the consequences of such manipulations for specific emotional behaviors.

Such "perturbational" studies of brain circuits are currently not possible to perform in humans, and are best accomplished in "animal models" of emotional behavior. We are in the midst of a revolution in the development of new technologies for experimentally manipulating brain circuitry, which promises to transform our understanding of many aspects of brain function, including sensation, perception, cognition and motor control. In order to effectively apply these powerful tools to the study of emotion, we need to choose model organisms suitable for studying this complex subject. The laboratory mouse combines powerful genetics with a brain structure that is fundamentally similar to that of humans. We are using this system to study the neural circuits of emotional behaviors related to fear and aggression. However mouse research is slow, costly, and technically challenging. Moreover the complexity of the vertebrate brain, with its 1011neurons and 1014 synapses, is daunting. Invertebrate model organisms, like the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster, whose central brain contains less than 50,000 neurons, are faster, cheaper, and can be used for powerful genetic screens that are difficult to perform in the mouse. Drosophila also contains many of the same brain chemicals found in humans and other vertebrates, including dopamine, serotonin and acetylcholine, and uses fundamentally similar synaptic mechanisms. But can one study "emotional" behavior in a fly, and if so what can we learn from it that is relevant to emotional behavior in humans? Research in this lab is aimed at addressing this fascinating question as well.

Enjoy this TED Talk.

David Anderson: Your Brain Is More than a Bag of Chemicals

Published on Mar 12, 2013

Modern psychiatric drugs treat the chemistry of the whole brain, but neurobiologist David Anderson believes in a more nuanced view of how the brain functions. He illuminates new research that could lead to targeted psychiatric medications -- that work better and avoid side effects. How's he doing it? For a start, by making a bunch of fruit flies angry. (Filmed at TEDxCalTech.)