Decoding the Brain
Presenter:
World Science Festival
Time:
1:10:43
Summary
How does the brain retrieve memories, articulate words, and focus attention? Recent advances have provided a newfound ability to decipher, sharpen, and adjust electrical signals relevant to speech, attention, memory and emotion. Join Brian Greene and leading neuroscientists György Buzsáki, Edward Chang, Michael Halassa, Michael Kahana and Helen Mayberg for a thrilling exploration of how we're learning to read and manipulate the mind.
Transcript
One useful way to organize our understanding of reality is to think in terms of things that are either very big, like stars and black holes, very small, like molecules, atoms and subatomic particles, or very complex aggregates of many particles that are highly ordered or structured. Tonight, we're going to focus on one of these three categories, the complex the human brain.
Now it is not uncommon to hear the brain described as the most complex structure in the entire universe, but as we have such a meager knowledge of what might be out there, I, for 1am, not ready to make that commitment, and there's no need to the brain is complex, and its functions not just wondrous, but the very substrate of who we are as individuals and as a species. So the pull to understand the brain is strong.