Introduction to Brain and Behavior | Neuroscience Course Overview

[00:00:11]good morning everybody my name is Professor Suzuki and this is brain and behavior it's a map course that satisfies the Natural Science 2 requirement so this class focuses on the discipline of Neuroscience trying to understand how the brain allows us to see feel sense remember and do all the things that we do and all the things that make us who we are I want to make a distinction between neuroscience and psychology so psychology is really the study of behavior very fascinating study um but we're going a little bit deeper than that trying to understand what exactly our brain is doing what are the connections and the synapses and the neurons and the circuits doing that allows us to do all the amazing things that we do so let me just get a quick overview of the class how many freshmen do I have in here okay great well welcome sophomores Juniors and seniors great okay happy to have you all um let me just give you a quick overview of the kinds of things that we're going to be learning about we're going to start with the basics some basic brain neuroanatomy what parts of the brain are there where are they relative to each other what is the three-dimensional organization of different structures um in the brain we've developed for the first time this year a uh a lab that I think is going to be very uh useful and exciting for you it is a sheep brain human brain Digital Atlas that you're going to actually create on your own in lab course you're going to be able to take away from from that lab your own personalized Digital Atlas of a comparative sheep brain human brain um Atlas uh so that you can remember all the different St brain structures that you used we're going to be talking about brain structures um then in the first chunk of the class there's kind of three three um uh parts of the class in the first chunk we'll really dive into to the building blocks of the brain now the brain really only has two types of cells in it the entire brain is made up of two types of cells does anybody know what kinds of cells they are are the names of these two kinds of cells anybody wild guess neurons second type starts with the g g Gia okay the whole brain is made up of only neurons and Gia just two types of cells of course there's different kinds of neurons different kinds of Gia but really it's only two main parts and our goal is trying to figure out how they're put together in all these different systems we're going to be talking about neurons glea and their interactions their Communications which are synaptic Communications uh they communicate through a combination of electrical and chemical synapses a huge chunk of the kind of conceptual um work that we're going to be doing in this first third of the class will be understanding those synaptic Communications new people that came in Eric's going to give you a syllabus over here um we're also going to be talking about neurotransmitters in the second part of the course we'll move on to sensory systems so how do we see how do we hear how do we feel how do we smell we're going to be talking about the general principles of organization that are similar across all the sensory systems and then we're going to move on to the motor system so once the sensory information comes in you want to do something about it you want to act in the world how is that motor system organized and then finally the third part of the class we will focus on higher cognitive functions I'm talking about learning memory emotion language we're going to end with one of my favorite lectures which is called the neurobiology of love so what do we know about social attachments and the parts of the brain important for social attachments so beyond that those are kind of the the basic barebones uh um topics that we're going to go over I do have three major goals for this class um the first goal is to give you a little bit of inspiration we're going to be talking about Nobel prize winning science here and in many different areas there's Nobel prizes in the study of the neur uh the neuron anatomy of the brain Nobel prizes in the study of the visual system a Nobel prize for the study of the molecular biology of of learning and memory my goal is that something across this entire semester is really going to inspire you maybe it's not cells and neurons maybe it's really language centers hemispheric specializations but I invite you to be open to that inspiration uh uh through the class second one of my main goals for this class and this is the second time I've taught this a big class like this is much more interaction so in a lot of these larger classes it's all about you know the professor standing up here and talking and you're just sitting there kind of passively passively but we all know that the best way to learn is to actually get involved get interactive and so to try and facilitate that the Tas and I have come up with three interactive projects for us to do each one in each of the thirds of the classes you'll be coming up here lots of interaction lots of opportunity to get involved I invite you um and encourage you to ask questions during class now um this is a big room I may not be looking over here when you're asking be a little persistent wave your hand I will always be happy to answer any questions during class so please uh please do that um and also I also want to encourage you all this is a big class there's a lot of information to learn and particularly if you just started here if you're freshman or sophomores uh you may not know a lot of people in the class I encourage you to get to know the people in the lecture but particularly in your lab sections form study groups use your fellow students to help learn this material to kind of get this ball rolling what I want you to do is turn around and introduce yourself to two people tell them your name and tell them what lab section you're in or you want to be please do that right now [Music] okay great hopefully you've made two new friends you will follow them through the class you will help them out you will form study groups you will come to me as groups and ask me whatever questions that you want to clarify anything you want this is the best way we know how to learn get interactive get uh um uh get involved in this topic matter and the best way to do that is uh meet your fellow students okay so that's the interaction goal the third goal is appreciation and this is a huge one I really focused on this last year as well appreciation by appreciation I mean I want you guys to gain an appreciation of all the different ways you see Nur science in your lives it's all over the news it's all over the New York Times it's all over different plays that you see here in New York and so one of my goals is to um uh uh really uh open your eyes to all the Neuroscience around you and to help you with that we have two different homeworks uh that that I'll talk about in a little while that will encourage this a media report where I'll ask you to go out and read something in the newspaper uh and write a little report uh associated with neuroscience and then a movie Project where we'll ask you to watch one of a wide range of uh movies that's associated with Neuroscience or neurology and um talk about how accurate those are relative to what you've been learning in class okay so inspiration interaction and appreciation Are My overall goals of this class um speaking of interactions um I just want to mention that um this class is being filmed for What's called the open education project so there is a camera back there and uh there are operators and they're they filming me they're filming the lecture part of the class um the uh we'll have interactive uh exercises up uh during the course of the class and uh those won't be filmed okay anytime a student is involved there's no kind of conflict of interest there's no privacy issues um you will not be filmed the the filming is about the lectures that I'm giving and the only thing is um that I I wanted to do this I just want to let you know I wanted to do this because I think it's important to open up this kind of information for as many people as possible so there's 150 people here but this is going to be on the web anybody can download these images and it's a great opportunity to um spread this information for anybody that's interested and two it kind of forces me and encourages me and inspires me to be as clear and concise uh as I can because I know it's not just you guys that are watching but it's anybody that can look at these lectures so um you won't notice uh the camera you won't be on camera and the only only thing that I'll do slightly differently is anytime a question is asked I will repeat that question um so the the microphone can pick it up but also so everybody else can hear the answer okay so let me tell you just a little bit about myself so I'm a professor of neuroscience and psychology my areas of research are the neurophysiology of memory I for the last 15 years have studied the patterns of neural activity um that allow us to form and retain new long-term memories for facts and events and more recently I've become interested in the effects of exercise on learning memory and cognition in humans uh as a subproduct of that I'm actually also a certified group fitness instructor and I teach a free exercise class every Sunday at the Palladium at the third floor multi-purpose room it's a high impact High aerobics class every Sunday throughout the semester you're are welcome to come you hear I will tell you all about the exercise research that we're doing you'll get a great workout so there's a signup sheet up here if you want um information about that so um the other thing that I'm involved with is I've co-founded a organization on campus called empowering women in science it's it's actually both for men and women it's really leadership training I run an Explorations dorm floor also at the Palladium called empowering women in science uh where we give free um leadership training seminars we also run a variet iy of different um uh uh programs where we bring women scientists in uh bring people uh scientists from the community in to talk and I will be um telling you about that if you're interested in learning more about that uh you can sign up on the sheets in front and just to give you a little bit of a heads up one of the programs we're working on um for um the fall for empowering women in science is a program um uh where we're going to bring we're going to try and bring um the act James Franco and he's actually a um Professor here at NYU and he just had a movie out called Rise of the Planet of the Apes and so um the program we're trying to put together is called um understanding uh the monkey mind uh in conversation Wendy Suzuki in conversation with James Franco so I will let you know about that and um hopefully that will be uh something that will uh happen in the fall other courses that I teach are um a course called can exercise change your brain um a course where we go over all the Neuroscience underline how exercise can uh um change brain's Anatomy physiology and function and at the same time you get an hour workout during the class as well um it's very popular and I also teach a class called the neurop physiology of memory which really is uh based on all the work that I've done um in understanding the brain basis of memory okay contact information I I encourage you all to go to my website www.w Suzuki you can read all about the research that we're doing see a little bit more about the exercise studies I'm on Twitter I'm going to be tweeting for this class um all about all the interesting Neuroscience um that I see in um the newspaper in the popular press and this is going to be very valuable for your media project because um you're all perfectly capable of going out but I can give you some hints of different um articles that I found particularly interesting our hashtag is BNB uh f 2011 brain and behavior fall 2011 I also tweet about other things but uh tweets particularly associated with this class I will use a hashtag um my email address is here I don't have set office hours because that usually doesn't work you want to see me email me and we'll find a time anytime so uh um always open to meeting with any of the students in the class teaching assistants we have two assigned teaching assistants right now a third will be assigned at the end of the week ER nylan say hello is one of our uh uh Stellar teaching assistants he will be running two of the labs which labs are you doing again uh the two afternoon Thursday ones two afternoon Thursday ones oh let me just tell you that um Eric or myself or Sarah who can't be here uh today um we don't have anything to do with the assignment uh of labs or the or allowing you to be in the course that is all done through the map office so any of those kinds of questions go directly to the map office because we can't uh intervene uh for those kinds of things the map office takes care of everything okay a little bit about the lectures as you know the lectures for this class um Monday and Wednesdays 11: to 12:15 lectures are mandatory as you'll see we go over a lot of information the book that we're using is biological psychology in the um in the bookstore sixth edition and the reason why you need to come to class is that you don't need to know this whole book Thank good goodness right I'm going to go over select parts of the book and the only reason the only way you're going to know what part we're going to be emphasizing is to come to class okay the other required text is our lab manual also available at the bookstore okay um homework there's going to be three homeworks that I'll assign in class one of them is a media report one of them is an experiment on the auditory system and the third one is the movie Project we'll give you written instructions on exactly how to do that um the exams there are two in-class midterm exams and one comprehensive final big red mark says no makeup exams I don't care if you're sick um makeup exams are not given and what we do is we have the final exam count more you don't want that to happen because the final exam is more difficult it's comprehensive um so um please try and make the M make the midterms if you possibly can grading is very much based on the exams 70% exams 25% your labs and 5% homework all course information all lectures are going to be posted on blackboard um the lectures uh the syllabus um uh are all on blackboard right now and finally please write this down today the final for this class is Monday December 19th in this room 10 to 11:50 okay I'm going to repeat that multiple times um you cannot miss the final make sure you're here on Monday December 19th it's great it's at the very beginning of finals so we get to get get the final over with um uh early in the in the uh finals period okay lab sections also mandatory let me just say and Eric and the other Tas are going to emphasize that we are going to be working with brain tissue you're going to be doing a sheep brain dissection lab we're going to be working with rats at the end of the semester in a rat Behavior lab these are mandatory squeamishness is not an excuse not to come to lab and if you don't want to do it then there's lots of other Neuroscience um or natural science uh map classes that you can take these are mandatory it's critical that you guys get a Hands-On field the the lab component really gets you into science and gets you kind of doing experiments on your own so it's absolutely mandatory that you are um uh uh that you participate in all these Labs let me just mention that um religious holidays come coming up there's two that will affect this class one uh September 29th and 30th some of you may not be present for um the review that we're going to have for exam one during those lab sections never fear for those of you who won't be here you must inform your ta and the T will organize an alternative review section that will be in a time that you can be here um the other uh uh um um um conflict could be October 13th and 14th this is a neuronal visualization lab for that one if you will be away because of the religious holiday um uh you again you must inform the TA before you you miss the class and that lab will not be counted if if you're going to be gone for the religious holiday okay so that's all the logistics let's get down to what we're here to study which is the human brain so this is a real human brain it's actually really dense if we have time at the end of the class you can come up and throw on a pair of gloves and pick it up but this is it this is what we're going to be studying for the LA next 15 weeks how this allows us to see feel here creates our own personal personalities so let me just show you a few aspects of this brain and actually let me just tell you it's talking about inspiration so I'm asking you to be a little bit open to inspiration the reason why I'm standing in front of you today is because when I was a freshman at UC Berkeley I took a um freshman seminar class there were only 10 or 15 of us with um a professor her name was is Marian Diamond she's a neuron animist that has studied brain plasticity and she pulled out a human brain just like like this and she said that what I'm holding is the most complex structure known to mankind it's the only structure that can think about itself think about that for a second understanding the brain we're so far away from understanding everything but what we're going to try and do is give you a flavor for how we've approached it and how far we've come in our understanding of brain function okay if this was my brain it'd be sitting in my head like this this is the frontal lob and my little eyes would be sitting right here okay looking out from right here this is the frontal loobe critical for our personality critical for things like working memory and critical for things like um keeping track of items okay let's go to the back of the brain here way at the back at the back of your head this is called the occipital lobe occipital lobe is important for what anybody know what's here at the back of the brain what function is mainly here Vision very good so that's why when you hit the back of your head you see stars you're physically stimulating this part of the brain and it's causing activation of your visual cortex okay if you damage this area of the brain whatever gunshot wound accident your eyes could be perfectly functioning you will be blind this is the part of your brain that allows you to see let's move up up here this is the parial lobe important for what's called visual spatial functions um people with damage to the parial lobe uh have what's called neglect so if you have uh right parietal damage you ignore everything on your left side you will not eat anything on the left side of your plate when asked to draw a clock you will only draw the right side of the clock and not the left side of the clock even though you say you have only drawn the person will say you've only drawn half the clock you'll not be able to see that you'll not be able to appreciate that visual spatial functions and finally this last lobe is the temporal lobe important for higher level vision and important for processing faces we're going to be talking about that a little later in the class and the last thing I want to show you is to flip this over this is a cerebellum anybody know what the cerebellum does yes motor functions excellent fine motor functions so being able to um um learn fine motor functions uh uh things like writing things like sewing are are dependent on the cerebellum take a look here what's the difference here yeah so there's a huge difference in this brain his or her left cerebellum is about twice as big as the right cerebellum we all any one of us in the classroom may have these kinds of asymmetries in a normal brain um they're both the same size I don't know whether this uh uh caused any problems but there's lots of variations that you see in brain structure but what I wanted to focus on is down here this is the bottom part of the temporal lobe and down here right below this cortex is a structure called the hippocampus this is a structure that I've studied for the last 20 years and it's um critical for our ability to learn and retain new long-term memories for facts and events Alzheimer's disease attacks the hippocampus first and what is the first symptom of Alzheimer's disease memory loss that because the hippocampus is being um uh uh damaged there are formations of what's called plaques and Tangles specifically in the hippocampus what's devastating is that those plaques and Tangles then slowly but steadily move out across and into these cortical areas first in the temporal lobe up to the frontal lobe and finally back into the whole cortex that's when you start seeing more and more severe dementia okay um the amydala important for emotion is right next to the hippocampus when that starts to get affected then your emotional responses become abnormal and finally the end point of Alzheimer's disease is death because those plaques and Tangles end up innovating and and infiltrating um the parts of the brain in the brain stem critical for breathing and heart rate and without that your system cannot function so that is the location of the hippocampus but just to give you a little bit of a flavor of what you're going to be focusing on on not in the first lab but in the second and third Labs understanding the function of this structure okay okay so what I like to do in these opening lectures is is give you a little bit of an overview but what I always do is try and choose a couple of examples that have been most striking to me about um uh something that I've seen in Neuroscience recently last year there happened to be a huge number of articles in the New York Times about Neuroscience so I just went through those and and just Illustrated how much Neuroscience is in the news this year it was two books that were really striking um and interesting to me and the first book is a book that was recently published called portraits of the Mind visualizing the brain from Antiquity to the 21st century um it was written by he's a graduate student at Columbia in in Neuroscience graduate stool school but but for many years has had a fascination with collecting Neuroscience illustrations from um the most beautiful illustrations from the most kind of technologically advanced techniques we have today all the way through Antiquity and he put them together in really a beautiful book so this was a great example of um just to give you some portraits and to show you the beauty of uh the Nur the nervous system and how it's been Illustrated over time so we're going to start with some of the early pictures this is just a a quick overview but anybody interested i' I'd really recommend that you um you check this book out um here is a picture A reproduction of the oldest known drawing of the visual system from 10:27 this drawing was made in Cairo and what we're looking at here is this is a picture of the eyes here's a little nose and what we're looking looking at is the um optic nerve coming up and crossing here at the optic kaym um you're going to see all of that in the Sheep brain dissection that we do in the second lab so even as early as 1027 people were interested in understanding the neuron anatomy and how vision gets to the brain okay now we're going to jump to the 19th century with the study that has been become known as phology now phenology got a bad WAP um during this time people were learning more and more about the brain and starting to develop the hypothesis that maybe different parts of the brain were important for different functions uh an early idea was that well the brain is involved in so many complex higher order functions as probably all of it has to participate so there's no localization of function some thought that in fact there were and certain parts of the brain were important for certain functions and just like a muscle if you had very strong intelligence then the intelligence part of your brain would start to bulge out maybe not so unusual or far-fetched an idea phrenologists took it one step further they said okay if you have an intelligence part of the brain and it bulges out because you're so intelligent then the skull is going to comp compensate you're going to get a little bulge in that skull because your brain is bulging out so therefore if I feel feel the bumps on your brain and I correlate that to whether you're really intelligent or whether you have great motor skills or whether you are a great writer then I'm going to be able to understand just from the bumps on the brain uh sorry on the skull exactly how brain the brain function is organized well um they went a little bit too far because they subdivided the brain into way too many different parts and uh in in the end and the bumps on the brain were not very uh uh consistent were not consistent at all across people though years and years of study was devoted to this and here you see a skull where one of the German phrenologists has has uh drawn on um their rendition of what parts of the brain are important for what parts of the skull are representing certain brain functions so phrenologists in the end were not respected and and that fell off the map but you see a remnant of phenology today and you're all familiar with it have you seen these drawings this comes from phenology okay and there's a little bit of Truth in these kinds of of Renditions and certainly um there are uh differences and and Maps made between the fem and I have to tell you I spent a long time to find one that wasn't completely offensive so this is this is a a kind of cleaned up version of of of the male female brain but it also brings up something that we're going to be talking about sex differences in the brain so I have this brain right here who here thinks that it's a male or a female brain who thinks it's a female brain who thinks it's a male brain okay why do you think it's a male brain you just okay just participating thank you that's good that's good um so uh um the fact is that looking at at the surface of the brain you cannot tell anything you can't even tell you think well I I know some friend he has a huge head maybe has you know a really big brain everybody knows that the size of your head has nothing to do with how intelligent you are why because intelligence has to do with how your brain is connected and that is not due to the size you can't tell from the surface um um what you can differentiate are the connections the neurotransmitter that are uh working or not working The receptors that are present are not present and they're causing differences between male and female brain we're going to be talking about what some of those differences are very interesting to um to start to look at that that is a relatively new field people have been interested in this in a long time for a long time but we're going to be talking about some of those things that really make some of the physiological and some subtle anatomical differences that we know exist in the brain you can't see on the surface but they do exist if you if you look uh microscopically okay so let's jump back 1875 here we're jumping back to one of the first ways that we've uh that we had to start to look at brain structure this is a technique it's a staining technique developed by a neur animist named Camilo GOI he was Italian and this is one of gogi's beautiful drawings of the AL Factory ball using his technique now let me just um emphasize that he never saw this beautiful picture that he he drew here he compiled this picture from lots of different sections in this stain what you have to do is you have to use Dead brain tissue and then you have to process it in very very costic chemicals what happens is every once in a while you'll get a beautiful section with only one neuron labeled but that neuron the entire body of the neuron the input Parts the dendrites the cell body and the output the axons will be entirely labeled they still don't know why but you can get those labeling um in this section so you can imagine that he labeled hundreds and hundreds of sections and excuse me he got um certain sections that gave nice labeling and he knew what structure he was staining and so he put this together based on all of his different uh labeling very intensive uh kind of uh um uh uh work to do but that was the early way that people in the early 1900s were first able to start to understand how the brain was made up and what neurons really look like for the very first time so Camila goldi was one of our Nobel Prize winners he shared the Nobel Prize with this gentleman Santiago Ramon kahal is known as the father of Neuroscience he was a brilliant neuroanatomist he used the same stain that Camilo he he used the same that the stain that Camilo goldi developed but he was able to um pull out a very fragmented uh data principles of organization that we now know are true today and that were confirmed which much with much more powerful techniques than he had at his disposal he used the goldie stain his eyes and a really rinky dck early microscope that's all he had and this gives you a beautiful illustration this is one of his illustrations again a compiled illustration he never saw this he developed this from lots of lot lots and lots of different stains that he did um uh of the retina where you see the um primary Sensory neurons of the retina up here the rods and the cones connecting to the three other uh two other layers in the re and finally going out and so he saw this he knew what the eyes were for the eyes are for vision and what he noticed is that the dendrites in this structure and in general tend to be of of lesser extent they they extend out lesser amount than the axons that can travel a long long distance and he gleaned from that that what is happening in this neuron in these neurons are probably a unique directional flow of information and he certainly saw this in the retina where he knew that all the information was going in One Direction and all the neurons were kind of facing in that direction with the dendrites on one hand and the axons on the other hand meeting the dendrites of the next cell towards the axons of the other and so he developed this idea of um the principle of uh directional specificity information always flows from the dendrites to the cell body to the axon now the only way to confirm this is with physiology which didn't come on uh online for many many different Year many many years and um he was able to glean these just by looking at his neuroanatomical preparations which is why he is still considered such a genius in uh the field of Neuroscience okay so we have this stain and and for many years including today people still use the goldie stain to look at dead tissue and figure figure out what the connections are but there's a problem you can only study dead tissue and the stain is only black if you're lucky you get one cell that's stained and in other sections you get a whole Black Mass because there's 30 cells or 100 cells that are stained and there's no way to tell the difference because they're all black you have to tell me there's a better technique than that and for many many years in fact up till about I don't know eight years ago the answer was no that was one of the Premier ways to look at the anatomy but we come to a new era of Neuroscience and the new era starts with a lowly what is this called a um jellyfish sorry the lowly jellyfish so um this is also a great example of what's called the value the value of what's called basic science so basic science is curiosity studying science for curiosity I'm interested I'm a basic neuroscientist I study memory now my studies are related to Alzheimer's disease and aging where memory gets worse but I don't study Alzheimer's disease and aging I'm interested in how memory Works neurobiologist was interested in how the jelly fish fluoresence okay and why is that important because this curiosity never know where this Vining is going to go this biochemist who actually won the Nobel Prize for this had no idea that he was going to develop the next best technique to the GGI technique when he started studying bioluminescence but he did so he was interested in the proteins that allowed this jellyfish to flues and he turned out to find two different proteins one that fluoresced blue and one that flues green and the green one would flues green only in the presence of of the blue one okay the blue one uh uh had a name but the one we're going to focus on is called Green fluorescent protein okay so um that's uh um the DNA sequence for green fluorescent protein or gfp as you'll hear it's called was then determined so we figured out what is the code of DNA that codes for green fuorescent protein in the DNA and then another neuroscientist said well I'm going to play with that and I'm going to actually insert green fluorescent protein into the DNA of a worm nervous system what happened is the worm nervous system lit up like a green Christmas tree and you got oh sorry so uh shimamura was the uh uh biochemist that looked at uh that first discovered green fluorescent protein and chaly was the one that first put green pesent protein into the DNA of worms and what he got were these worm neurons that were fluorescing green yes what year was this this was in the80s late 80s well actually sorry it goes for a long time it was in the 60s that shamura found the um different kinds of uh fluorescent protein and then in the 80s into the '90s cheli put it into the um uh worm and so we got these beautiful images so now we've moved from black stain to a beautiful green stain but the cool thing is with the um technology of molecular biology you could actually insert green fluorescent protein into an entire organism and the main organism that we use in molecular biology in these genetic process approaches is the mouse and so you could actually make a green fluorescing Mouse this is not a joke so the whole it doesn't hurt the cells I mean it's completely innocuous but these are mice where shining a blue light on it and you can see which three mice have gfp inserted into all their cells they're glowing green okay so this is cool and um what it allows us to do is two things that we weren't able to do with the goldi stain one we are able now to study live cells in the brain and two we're able with molecular biology to then insert gfp into specific kinds of cells in the so we could study a whole class of cells at the same time much more powerful approach but then you say well everything's green so you still have the problem of if there's too many green cells at the same time you still have a hard time visualizing and that's where the third researcher who shared this Nobel Prize all three of these up here uh shared the Nobel Prize um um Roger Chen um who started playing with green fluorescent protein and looking at the fluorescent proteins of not just this um jellyfish but other fluorescing jellyfishes to start to tweak those colors and get a whole series of different colors so Chen uh kind of got the ball ball rolling and others jumped in to really identify so many different colors and they called it brainbow okay so this is a real term it's brainbow and uh what they're able to do now is um genetically go in and unfortunately what they can't do is say Okay I want cell all cell a to be green and then I want all cell b b to be red and all cell C to be yellow um they get a a random array of cells but you're able to visualize many more cells together in circuits and um you can imagine that this is so important for um the study of the brain because there are hundreds of billions of cells in the brain and imagine what the what the um uh task of poor romon kahal and Camilo GOI was with by studying one cell at a time okay what you really want to do is study circuits and one particular circuit important for one thing and not just the cells but their synaptic connections we're getting a little bit closer to this uh but it's still not perfect but I'll just show you a couple of the really beautifully stunning pictures that you get with this brainbow techn technique this is brainbow applied to the cerebellum ending in press synaptic what's called rosettes and so you can see lots of different cells have been labeled uh and here are their axons and they're labeling these little Puffs are the rosettes um ending in the um uh in the cerebellum and here are axons of um motor neurons that are all again colored with different colors of the brain bow and you see all of their axons going down this is a critical uh um point of visualization so there are cells and you can see the cell bodies but their axons could go for meters and meters so I want you all to close your eyes for just a second close your eyes be completely still and everybody move your right toe still and moving your right toe okay open your eyes so here's what happened your left brain your primary motor cortex is right about here you had a whole bunch of neurons that represent the motor output of your right toe they were firing like mad their axons went from here all the way down your spine all the way down your leg and they terminated in those muscles that were moving your right toe that's a huge Pathway to go imagine how long how long Shaquille O'Neal's axons for his right toe are now imagine im a giraffe that is moving his right hoof that's a motor neuron that's going from his tiny little giraffe brain sorry no offense to the giraffes but they're tiny but he does have a motor cortex all the way down the neck all the way down so this gives us a a way to visualize these very very long Pathways okay and then I just want to end uh this part uh of the book with um uh methods that you I'm sure you've heard of um magnetic resonance imaging MRI that it's been around for a while but I just want to point out that it has been uh so valuable for the study of Neuroscience now that MRI images just structural MRI images have become so um uh precise in their resolution um this is the brain of a very famous patient named hm anybody heard of patient hm yes what was he famous for that's close that's Phineas Gage this is hm yes excellent yes he had anterior grade Amnesia so when he was 27 he suffered well actually from the time he was about 8 till he was 27 he suffered from very very severe epilepsy and a common treatment for epilepsy is removal of one hippocampus I talked about the hippocampus here what's the Hipp hippocampus important for memory so the the this was before we understood how important the hippocampus was for memory and his his epilepsy was so severe that they decided to remove both Hipp a campai just to make sure the epilepsy was alleviated well they did alleviate his epilepsy but from the moment that he woke up when he was 27 years old till he passed away just a couple of years ago when he was in his 80s he had no ability to put any new information into his long-term memory and um for many years so of course this the the operation was done in the 50s so they had no way to image um and for a long time it was thought that the um aneurysm clips that they put in his brain during his surgery were ferromagnetic so he couldn't be imaged using MRI it was later discovered that in fact those clips are nonferromagnetic so we were we were able to get an amazing live picture of what his brain looked like um uh uh while he was still alive and this is an image from that so on the left hand side you see images from hm brain hm's brain so you can see these holes are where the damage was and on the right hand side our control brain so you can see what the normal brain looks like in the first top two um uh slides uh on the right you see the amydala important for emotion that's damaged in patient hm hm was said to have a a flat aect probably due to the amigdala damage here we're starting the hippocampus here clearly damaged the hippocampus and here very tiny hippocampus left so through the study of patient hm who to this day is probably the most carefully studied neurological patient uh that exit existed um we have started to understand the organization of how memory works in the brain focused on this key structure the hippocampus now we've gone a long way from these simple structural images to uh a new technique called diffusion MRI which allows us to image again those infusive and very very thin axons those those outputs of the neurons and here we're looking at the axons in the cerebral cortex and this is from a patient with damage uh to the thalamus in the BR midbrain anybody have a guess where that damage is shown on this slide where do you think the damage is where are you pointing up or down down this yeah so this exactly so here all these little terminals are little pieces of axons that are just damaged they're here this is the thalamus and this is the midbrain these are healthy um uh axons and then you can see exactly where that damage is so it's a a very precise way to look not just at where the cells are damaged to get this uh precise image of where the fibers are damaged as well okay so that gives you a little overview of um uh some of the kind of pictoral representations of the history of Neuroscience and where we are in kind of visualization functions but uh I told you I had two examples of appreciations and things that I've I've seen in the literature and the second comes from a book that I read the book is called spark how creativity works by Julie burin who's actually here in the audience today so we could ask her any questions that that come about about this book and this is a wonderful book uh that was taken from a series of interviews uh that was done on a public radio program that Julie was the executive producer of called Studio 360 where they were able to bring in all the most creative people really in the world and interview them about their creativity about their lives and what Julie did is she kind of distilled down um um what is it about them what is about their history that makes them creative and just to give you a a flavor for some of the people that she describes uh there's artists there's Broadway Stars there's um uh TV stars there's there's musicians there's authors there's playwrights but the chapter that that sparked my interest in and and uh in in just realizing how much Neuroscience comes in to all the stories that that uh kind of come across our desks is um the first one on the list Chuck Close Chuck Close is uh one of the preeminent artists of our time he's known as a photo realist and I like to show this picture because it shows the expanse and the size of the art that he does here's somebody in standing in front of his kind of prototypical um uh pieces of art it may look like a photograph this is actually a painting it's huge it's 10t High by S feet wide and he said that um he likes to kind of put the viewer in uh Gulliver's Travel shoes where he goes to uh the land of Giants and you have to crawl over the crevices of this guy's nose and and lips to kind of get into the art so he creates these huge pieces what's so interesting about Chuck close is uh his history and how he ended up creating this kind of art and it really comes from um uh both his abilities and his disabilities Growing Up So as he says um he had severe learning disabilities growing up he had a hard time reading he had a hard time doing math he had a hard time writing and um uh teachers basically told him that you know you're just not very smart and I just want to play a little audio clip here um that gives you a feeling in his own words of uh what those early um years were like I think I learned early on that uh since I also wasn't athletic and uh I couldn't run or catch a ball or throw a ball that I needed to do something to keep people around me so I began doing magic acts and puppet shows and I began to realize that one of the things that I could do that my friends couldn't do uh was draw and uh I was lucky enough to have the support of my family and and uh to to feel like I had something to say even though I didn't say it in the uh traditional way I was uh learning disabled although in the 40s and 50s nobody knew from learning disabilities I was just dumb okay so out of these learning disabilities he certainly at an early age recognized um his artistic abilities at the age of eight he was studying with a teacher and he was drawing you know nude from from nude models which he says made him the Envy of all the little boys in his neighborhood um so uh um he certainly recognized his artistic um bent uh very early but why why faces well that comes out of another issue that he had with his visual system and here I'll quote from Julie's book um she says he's also certain that his choice of subject that is the big faces stems from another facet of his learning disability he says quote I've had face blindness or postop agnosia my whole life really it's been a nightmare situation for me close once said I don't know who anybody is and have essentially no memory at all for people in real space but when I flatten them out in photo in um in a photograph I can commit that image to memory in a way I have almost a kind of photographic memory for flat stuff so his taking photographs of people in all of his early work were self-portraits but of his friends were were a way for him to actually commit those images to memory now I've seen him interviewed in lots of uh in a number of different situations I highly recommend go look at the step colar interview with Chuck Close it's actually hilarious um but he says that um CH you know coar ask him you know what what does it look like when you're looking at me and he says well every time your face moves I it looks like somebody different so I have no idea that you're the same person you and I can generalize across all the different angles if I move this way and move this way you don't think it's suddenly a different Professor up here it's still me he is not like that and he said that even um you know um friends that have lived with him for many years in the same house he still doesn't recognize them now of course you can recognize the voice but face recognition is is hard we're going to be talking about that that is part of the visual system face recognition is a critical social aspect in our lives and we know the brain area critical for that it's in the temporal loob and it lights up when people are asked to um uh recognize different faces this is clearly gone in chut close but look at what he was able to do with the uh talents and the abilities that he had to create amazing art through his his uh attempt of um um learning the faces in the way that he was able to so let me just play the second and last quote where he gives a a really nice also part of my learning disability was being overwhelmed by the hull and uh I found it to be uh particularly uh helpful to to use a grid to uh to isolate one small piece that I could work on and forget about the rest of the picture but at a certain point in my work I began to let the grid show uh and to leave it as part of the picture so what is he talking about this grid what he's saying is that you know he not only flattened out the picture but he actually subdivided it in different parts because what its process is here is also a very famous self big self portrait from 1967 but what he did was the following this is a photograph that he took of himself and what he did is simply superimposed a grid on top of that and then blew up that grid and painted each grid one by one he was overwhelmed by the whole He subdivided it and re uh reproduced each little bit bit by bit so he as a person with his kind of brain could understand it better it turned out like this and what he was saying is that at first he he didn't let the grid show but later this is also a much more realistic one later in other works the grid became part of the work and it was part of what he was able to show um even working with this uh more confining grid you can see as you look at his work all the different ways that he was able to use it uh using different materials sometimes spray paint sometimes little dots um this is a stamp that he used to reproduce the same this is Philip Glass uh um famous portraits of Phil Philip Glass that Chuck closes is famous for so prosopagnosia um uh part of the visual system that we're going to be talking about the second aspect I got to the another part of the chapter where he uh he talks about what he calls the event in his life this happened in 1988 and this was a very rare spinal aneurysm that actually left him paraplegic so he's in a wheelchair to today uh after a lot of Rehabilitation he was able to use his his hands and still paint so thank goodness you know we didn't lose that uh uh that gift but the spinal anism was severe and we are also going to be talking about what is the organization of the spinal cord that removes both motor and sensory function um uh at a particular given level and so that is uh that aneurysm which is a bur of a blood vessel that basically killed the spinal cord at a certain level and removed all input so all those axons going down to move your toe if if that uh um uh that spinal damage would uh eliminate that ability for you to move your toe or to feel the uh feedback from the sensory uh information from moving your toe so um what happened after the spinal aneurysm he recovered he's able to come back but something very interesting happened and that is a shift in his art he moved from images like this and this to images like this color color came in and many people have described these forms uh these paintings as much more emotional than uh the others I don't know I I do think these kind of images where each one you can see the grid hopefully and you can see that each one of these grids is not simply dots or or spray paint but complex designs hot dog designs ellipses different shapes in different colors that when you step back and see the hole it's still a Hu a whole face I think this is richer I think this is um I think it is more emotional but that's just my opinion these are also very very striking especially I I I find this one very very striking but this is the same self-portrait this is later self-portrait 1997 very emotional why do I think it's emotional does anybody else have a feeling do they think do they like the color ones let me show you a couple of other color ones same kind of techniques versus the black and white ones what do you think the difference is do you like the black and white ones or the color ones do you see a difference kind of emotionally as you see as you look at these pictures this is not an art appreciation class but it is a neuroscience class and the way that you um the reason why I think that the color ones are more more emotional is because that visual input is coming in it's being processed by structure called the amydala the amydala is critical for both positive and negative emotion the amydala is supercharged in people that suffer from PTSD in those people even the most innocuous stimuli come in and Trigger huge emotional negative memories from whatever trauma they experience experienced why because the amydala is a structure that gets inputs from all sensory modalities and Rich inputs from sensory modalities but its output is to the areas that make your heartbeat faster and make your stomach get all in knots when you're nervous or calm the stomach down so the amydala has this interesting um uh uh place in the highways of the brain between sensory input and emotional output and that's what's causing some people to think this or this is more emotional or not or maybe you think they're they're both the same okay and lastly uh the the last uh um element of this chapter that I thought was so interesting relative to Neuroscience is um that in fact a uh um Neuroscience paper in the journal science which is the best journal in science was written it was written by uh a colleague right here in the psychology department uh at n Dennis p and what he looked at was the visual perception comparing this that's very hard this is I've blown this up can you see a face here yes yes can you see it better there yes yes okay so what happens is when the pictures are blown up so big and and so I'm simulating you at a mum looking really close up and I can't see any of the Contours and moving back moving back moving back until you see that face pop out what makes that face pop out and the whole paper was about kind of the visual illusion that uh Chuck Close uh uh has created in his art and it's actually uh brought out something that people didn't realize before that is the size in this case the size of his grids um uh affects uh the shape and the Contours that you're able to see at a certain distance the nose here pops out but if you're too close it's just a flat surface and the whole paper was about what about the different elements were making that nose pop out and the critical element was size and so the research for this paper was going to the museum and going close and going far away and going close and going far away and and just doing uh these the kind of self um uh study on what you see at different levels and it's ironic for a kid who couldn't do math at all um to uh then have his work studied for these very kind of Technical and mathematically oriented um principles of how the visual system work in fact um I don't know it must have been about 10 years ago Chuck Close came here for a um a seminar on Art and Neuroscience and this paper had just come out and it was uh it was discussed um extensively so that was that was very exciting but just to give you a Feeling for all the different ways even you might think you I'm reading my you know this book for pleasure so many different aspects of Neuroscience that I saw that we're going to be covering so I wanted to share that with you okay so I'm going to end with um uh a quote uh at the end of um this chapter and it's a quote by Chuck Close and he says inspiration is for amateurs and the rest of us just show up and get to work but so much of it comes out of the process if you try to preconceive everything you do and conceptualize it you're going to do the same thing over and over if however you get busy and things occur to you in the process you make the rules and therefore you can break them so he's all about kind of spontaneity even in his kind of grid-like work but um despite the fact that he thinks inspiration is for amateurs um I think that many creative people use inspiration a lot I certainly use inspiration in my work as a scientist and again um this is what I want you guys to be focused on um as we go through this class so Monday come back we'll start with neuro Anatomy anybody interested in um any of the programs that I talk about come up sign up for the email account and I will see you on Monday