月４ Unit 5 Video Scripts

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Unit 5: Inside the Brain Video Script

3-D Brain Scans　　Page 92-93

Man 1: I’m trying to introduce the study of the brain to a bunch of students. I said
“If understanding everything you needed to know about the brain is a mile,” I asked the
students, “how far have we walked in this mile?”

I got answers. Three-quarters of a mile, half a mile. Someone said a quarter mile. And I
said, “I think about 3 inches.”

This is unconventional science. There’s just this huge gap in our knowledge about how
brains work, partially because we have no idea what they actually are made up of at the
finest level.

When it comes to the nervous system, there are a large number of diseases where the
only real sign that there’s something wrong is the outward manifestation of the disease.

A person is acting crazy or they don’t seem to learn very well, or their movements are
disordered in some way.

But if you look at their brain, most of the techniques we have, there’s nothing to see.

You’ve got to see the wires. You just have to see them. And you have to see where they
come from, where they go, what they connect with and be able to map that out in
enough detail that ultimately you will be able to render the information that goes into a
brain to see the wiring diagram at the resolution of every single synaptic vesicle in
every synapse. Enough resolution so that we can see everything in a wiring diagram.

I’m a lab head of a group of people who work together. It’s kind of a shifting group of
people. But it’s difficult work, and it requires many kinds of experts. So there are lots
of people working together on this project.

Man 2: What we’re trying to understand is how cells in the brain communicate with　each
other.

I have to look at the entire pipeline from the beginning where we start with a mouse.
Make a sample. Process the tissue. Cut sections. And then ultimately begin imaging
them.

The slice is like you’re cutting in a loaf of bread except you’re trying to slice very thin
pieces of tissue.

So for a millimeter depth, you get about 33,000 sections.

Man 1: Each section of the brain is next to the section that was sliced just before it, and the slice
right after it is the next frame.

And if you play these frames in sequence, you see the brain not over time, but over space
as if you’re looking deeper and deeper into the brain.

The big objects you see that appear and then slowly go out of appearance. Those are nerve
cells that are being cut through. And coming off of these cells are these large, light-colored
objects, which are the dendrites.

Every little object in here is a little wire to keep track of these cells from one section to
another. What you’d like to do is kind of color them in. So every one of these colors have
no meaning other than to keep track of each object from section to section.

What this allows us to do is to generate a wiring diagram based on this.

We now know everything about these wires here, and from that, we can generate all the
connections of every cell in that area.

Information forces you into this uncomfortable position, where you have to kind of say,
“Okay. I don’t get it, but I know that the real world is more complicated than the way I’m
thinking about it.”
I feel it’s a very long road and we’ve just started. That’s my view.