Transcripts For WETA Charlie Rose 20130716

Additional funding provided by these funder its . From our studios in new york city this is charlie rose. Tonight we continue our exploration of our magnificent human brain with a consideration of president obamas new Brain Initiative. The president announced in april the new effort which seeks to revolutionize our understanding of 9 human brain. He has described the initiative as one of his administrations grand challenges for the 21st century. Project has drawn comparisons to the human again only project as well as president kenny kennedys 1961 challenge to land a human on the moon in 10 years. Two National Student of Health Directors helping to lead the initiative join us now, story landis, thomas insel and with us are colonelia bargmann of Rockefeller University and William Newsome of standford. They are cochairs of the Advisory Board for the initiative. An once again my cohost is dr. Eric kandel. He is a nobel laureate, professor at Columbia University and Howard Hughes medical investigator. Im pleased to have all of them at this table. And so we begin once again with my colleague dr. Eric kandel to give us a look at what we might include in this program as we look at this initiative. Welcome. Chrlie, you outlined it very well as alwaysment today we look at the Obama Brain Initiative which is designed to get a better understanding of the human brain. The human brain looks simple enough t weighs about 3 pounds and if you look at the image on the screen, as threatically pleasing. It looks like it would not be very difficult to understand. The fact is its the most complex object in the universe. It makes us who we are. Its responsible for every behavior, every thought, action that we carry out from the simplest automatic behaviors like breathing and swallowing to walking, running, and cognitive acts like planning, thinking, creating works of art. But how one moves from those higher mental processes to understanding how the brain mediates that is an extraordinary difficult challenge. I think most scientists consider this the greatest challenge in the 2 1st century. In fact, one can argue its the greatest challenge science has ever faced. You mentioned p png a person on the moon. The human genome, these are enormous accomplishments. They dont compare in complexity. Rose pail by comparison. Thth pail by comparison to this, this is an extraordinary difficult tax. This is as you pointed out where president obama appreciated when he announced in the press conference in april that several us attended that this is the next major american initiative. Thank you all for being here today. Im francis collins, director of the National Institute its of health. Hnih and i am proud to have the honor of welcoming you here to the east room of the white house for a very special scientific announcement. So without further ado, it is a great personal privilege and a high honor to introdeutz our scientist in chief, the president of the United States, barack obama. applause ideas are what power our economy. Its what set its us apart. We do innovation better than anybody else. And that m mes our economy stronger. And every dollar we spend to map the human genome has returned a 140 dollars to our economy. One dollar of investments, 140 in return. So dr. Collins help lead that genome effort, and thats why we thought it was appropriate to have him here to announce the next Great American project and thats what were calling the Brain Initiative. As humans we can identify galaxies lightyears away. We can study particles smaller than an a tomorrow but we still havent unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears. So as a result were still unable to cure diseases like alzheimer or autism or fully reverse the effects of a stroke. Theres this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked. And the Brain Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action, and better understand how we ththnk and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be, will be transform difficult. Imagine if no family had to feel helpless watching a loved one disappear behind the mask of parkinsons or struggle in the grip of ep will will epilepsy. Imagine if we can reverse traumatic brain injury or ptsd for our veterans coming home or if millions of americans were suddenly finding new jobs in these fields. Jobs we havent even dreamt up yet because we chose to invest in this project. We cant afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the worldraces ahead. I dont want the next job creating discoveries to happen in china or india or germany. I want them to happen right here in the United States of america. And thats part of what this Brain Initiative is about. We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions but billions of people on this planet. As president obama made clear the Brain Initiative is a very ambitious project. And it has a number of partners both public and private. The Public Partners are the nih, the National Science foundation, and the defense establishment. And the private ones arehe allen institute, the Howard Hughes medical institute, the Salk Institute and the kennedy foundation. These have their independent leadership but the coordination is going to be provided by the National Institute of health and its director Francis Colins with the help of story landis and tom insell and the institute of mental health. The nih is also appointed an extraordinary Scientific Advisory committee, the best people in the field and cochaired by corey bogman and bill newsome. So we have four of the major leaders of this effort and we will see what the names of this effort are and how were going to achieve it now despite the fact that this is an enormous challenge, we couldnt be in a better position to take it on. And this is for several reasons. One is as anyone listening to the brain series would appreciate, neuroscience has not exactly been sleeping for the last several decades. Theres been enormous progress although we have a long, long way to go. For example, in simple animals such as worms and flies and mice, we are beginning to understand how systems work, hour motor systems function, how they interact with one another and we understand simple forms of learning and how memory is stored. In complex animals and primates we understand cognitive functions that dont even involve movements of the body. Thinking, planning, acting. We understand this and are beginning to understand this in var yis levels. So why is this useful . Evolution is conservative. Once we work out how a biological problem is solved the chances are components of it are going to be conserved. So this is going to provide background knowledge for understanding the human brain. A second point is that in order to make advances we need Technological Developments. And i think its fair to say that weve never been in a better position in terms of Technological Developments than we are right now. When i began in neuroscience a mere 55 years ago we recorded from oneell at a time, now we can record from several hundred cells at the same time. This is necessary but not sufficient. We can also ask how are they interconnected. How do they control behavior. We can activate certain patterns of neurons and others we can inhibit certain cells and ask what is the consequences of question javier. This is a very powerful set of methodologies. Not only do we have physical logical methodologies but wonderful anatomical methodologies to see how the nerve cells are interconnected. Third, were not alone in this project. There is a parallel effort in europe,s had a very different purpose. Its designed to simulate the human brain with supercomputers. Now the overall purpose of the Brain Initiative is to understand the normal human brain. But its inconceivable that studying the normal human brain wouldnt have fantastic spinoffs for schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer Disease, parkinsons disease, the list g gs on, the tragedy of humankind. These are the kinds of things we ultimately want to understand. So is the challenges are enormous. But the opportunities are great. And were going have a wonderful discussion of how to approach this. Rose before i turn to tom, tell me who can claim credit for first having this idea . Do you know . Probably came f fom the kevly initiative. Rose really they said why dont dow something they said to people in the white house why dont we do Something Like this. Rose and the president was responsive because did he say immediately i like this idea. I think he has been listening to charlie picture of the full wiring diagram of the human brain. And thats pretty exciting. Everything i are just told you mouse and human are still sort of static images and i think the challenge for us in the way that eric talked about is how do you go from static to dynamic. The president said we need a dynamic picture of the brain and how the brain does thought. Rose now the human genome project did not have a specific end date. The president said in ten years well do man on the moon. What is the time frame work for this . Its impossible to say the time frame. The human brain is much more complicated, with the human genome we knew what the end point is. You wanted to have a complete sequencece human genes. Here we dont know what the logic of the brain is. We dont know what the end point is were going to find it out as we go along. So i would say you know were looking something that realistically is between 50 and 100 years. 50 and 100 years. Yeah. But there will be progress. There will be enormous progress all along the way but a complete understanding of the human brain is to the going to be done in 20 or 30 years. Rose okay. I think obama had it right when he said this is a grand challenge for the 21st century. I think the longterm, you know, to really get to the human brain and its dynamic activity and how it relates to our cognitive and emotions, i think it goes far beyond 10 years but we have very specific goals that we can hit in the next ten years. We have more reason to start early. Let meso what makes it, what makes this so enormous and so much larger than anything weve done before whether its putting the engineering or putting the man on the moon or the supercomputer that helped us map the human genome. The main thing is what eric said awhile ago is that this is the most complex entity in the known university. Because . Because it has a hundred million parts, a hundred million neurons, those each have millions of parts. What is a neuron. A nerve cell. So weve got the basic signaling element and each neuron itself is a very complex little device an each neuron connects to a thousand other neurons so when you start looking at the map of the web of the connections it is simply the most complex map that we know of in the world. So many of all those neurons are organized into circuits. One several connected to others connected to others like the leg bone to the knee bone to the thighbone to the hip bone. And we dont understand how information is processed as one neuron connects and speaks to another. Were beginning to get some pretty important insights because theres now a tool optogenetics that allows us to turn particular neurons in a circuit on or off. What youll see is a rat freely moving, behalfing rat which has attached to its head a light emitting diode. And that light emitting diode is simulating particular sets of neurons. And the red light is actually inhibiting that nerve cell, the star shaped thing, and the blue lights are exciting other neurons. So this is a tool that lets us detect the roles of particular neurons in circuits which mediate particular behaviors. And weve learned some Amazing Things using this tool. So if you have a stroke, a corticol stroke, its not uncommon for patients who have had a stroke to actually end up with epilepsy. And weve not known seizures. Weve not known what the source of that hyperexcise ability is. But using this tool we now know that its nerve cells in a particular part of the brain called the thalamus which will give us cues as to how we pit intervene. Or people have discovered that theres actually a circuit in the hypocampus the part of the brain that deals with memory which mediates a fear response and if you excite those neurons will you get a rat to freeze in place j jt as it would if it got an he verse of stimulus. So this it tool is owning up a way to understand how particular elements in the circuits in the brain work. Now what we need to do taking these tools, the ones that tom talked about, the one that i spoke about and there are many others but time is not infinite is to think about how we go to plan from where we are now to have a deep conversation about what the goals achievable goals in the next five years or 10 years for the Brain Initiative would be. You need to have a conversation among scientists about what is achievable in the next ten years or is it a broader conversation with private and everybody else. I think its a broader conversation but its starting with scientists, neuroscientists, engineers, nanotechnologists, material scientists, to begin to think about if you could dream up any tool that you would like to study the brain, what would it be. Dont think about what we can do now but what you would like to do. Ferndz what will the steps you could get to in five years and ten years and to begin to think about what the deliverables would be. That is the question i like, tell me what you think we need to do to start the conversation. Well, the first thing we need to do is to just break down the problem and ask what sorts of things we would like to be able to do. Thats a very broad conversation among neuroscientists. So you saw these pictures of the human brain. You saw what a nerve cell is there are tens of billions of nerve cells in the human brain that means there are more nerve cells in your brain than human beings on the entire planet. And were trying to understand whats going on in the equivalent of the entire planet at the same time. And so we have to break that problem down. And one of the things to understand is that these guys are not a aing niply of each other. Nerve cells act together. They act together locally in groups. They act together over the entire brain. So your whole brain makes a decision about what you are doing. And that makes the problem very complicated in humans. So we try and break the problem down at different levels. We try to look at sort of parts of the human brain at a large scale but we alsoso try to look at simpler brain because there are animals that have just a few hundred nerve cells or a few thousand nerve cells or a few hundred thousand nerve cells. And yet these animals also have brains that can make decisions, that can perceive the environment, that can learn, remember, fight, mate, choose a partner, rear their young. And all of those are done with much simpler brains. And the idea of trying to understand a brain with just a few thousands of neurons or a few hundreds of neurons gives you the possibility of understanding what every element is doing so you can try to understand how the behavior of the whole brain relates to the behavior of all of the individual little moving parts. So we need to work back and forth from simple levels to complex levels. Thats what well need to understand what these kinds of circuits and networks the cells are doing. And unstanding the brain as a whole is really critical. If you think of the brain as just one part that does one thing and another part that does another thing, youre missing something very important and youre missing probably some of our major avenues of making progress in terms of Brain Disorders. Its understanding the whole network that we need to have. So not to embarrass you or bill, but when you were named as cochair of the Advisory Committee what were your marching orders . Our marching orders were to determine how the activity the of the brain and time and space gives rise to our thoughts, our perceptions, our memories. In four months. In four months. Our main watch marching order was to follow corey, actually. Rose and build on what we already know. But be clear, this initiative is to the about entirely solving the problem but developing the tools to help us address the problem in a new way. And what the president talks about is he says neurotechnologies. Hes looking for us to create the next generation of tools so that we can attack this with a lot more precision than weve been able to up until now. So i think this is very critical insight. When corey and i originally formed this committee, our charge s to really create the next generation of tools thats going to allow the science to flourish much more than it has now. Most of us who have been in this field for a few decades understand that there is a revolution going on right now. So these tools youve heard mentioned in the show already did not exist eight years ago. Opti genetics did not exist eight years ago. Some of the ones you will see in just a few minutes did not exist six months ago. And the pace of technological change is so rapid right now that those of us who were traditional spermal scientists have to say whoa, what does it even mean to be an spermal scientist in this day and ajs. We have to think what sperms are possible and it opens up vistas that have just, were unimaginable, charlie, ten years ago. So obama really picked, he was pres cents. He picked an amazing time. I mean it was the right project at the right time bebese the technologies are enabling and the technological pace of change is going to accelerate over the next five years. Do i hear you saying part of the difficulty or challenge you have to find the tools to make the discovery you need to page. But the tools are coming. The tools are coming and the pace of tool building is going to accelerate. And what, that is one thing that our committee is really doing. G. Were trying to look into the future. Were trying to see what has been done in the last five years and trying to see where that trajectory is going it to take us in the next ten years and make recommendations to the n, h about where the best Strategic Investments really lie, to move this thing forward. I think what is so wuflt wonderful about this initiative is that the nih is providing coordinated leadership, if you will, to these independent partners. The idea of setting up a Scientific Advisory group that is outstanding, that studies what needs to be done is a superb first move. Because people could just go off in all sorts of directions. This is an orderly, conceptual thing. Since are you speaking, you have got a huge grant from Mark Zuckerman at columbia. Not personally but you were connected to the idea that im getting interested in that. Organizations like that are going to be connected to going to benefit enormously. Benefit what they do but i mean is there everybodys this is a big problem. A huge problem. Everybody is involved. Its too bismingt and its good to have the europeans taking a different approach because it is a competition of ideas. Rose is it a race. No, because a race is when two people are going for the same goal. Here wes going for parallel goals that might actually intersect at some point. Rose to stimulate the brainin yes. Which can be complementary. Very complementary. Were taking a more spement spermal approach which will help what they do. It is more conceptual than method logical. We have this intrinsic feeling that we know so little about the brain right now we really needs to acquire more biological data in order to be able to simulate intelligently so i think the data that we produce will help them and hopefully some of the concepts they produce will help us. I would like to make one point about the time line and that is at every point were going to make progress. Which is going to not just give us insight in the brain but also will have benefit for clinical neurology and y trie. When are you speak being immediate gains versus longterm gains the longterm gapes give a complete understanding of the human mind is an enormous undertaking that will take a long time but 10, 20 years from now we will be at a different level than we are now, not only in terms of understanding but in terms of treatment. Everything builded on it, everything. That is right. So i mean im just thinking as we started, if you had the tools you had today what you might have done in the work that made you earned you a nobel you cant imagine how primitive we were compared to what we were now, no comparison. Tell me about behavior in neuroscience and what role it plays. Okay. So behavior is absolutesly crucial. There is a famous quote from the evolutionary biologist from the middle of the 20th century who said that nothing in buyology makes sense except in the light of evolution. And we need a neuroscience for that today, that nothing in neuroscience makes sense except if the light of behavior. Nervous systems he involved to produce behavior. Behavior is what is selected for. And everything that happens in a nervous system one way or the other, directly or indirectly is involved in producing behavior. So the study of behavior and looking at the neuroactivity in the context of behavior is absolutely crucial. Nothing will make sense if we done have good control. The function of the brain is to drive behavior. Even when you dont feel the action, things are being planned. Things are going on in the head that really reflected ultimately behavior. So in simple animals we can talk about behavior is ctually being muscle contractions and the animal moves over here to grab a prey or moves over here to identify a mate. And in us sitting around this table there are lots of mental procecees and cognitive processes going on that qualify as behavior even though they dont result in the contraction of a muscle right this minute. Help me understand too. Theres not a focus in this initiative on diseases of the brain. Not a direct focus. Try and just figure out enough about the brain and the groundwork that we can use it to apply to all 69 different Brain Disorders that it might be relevant to. Thats the thinking. So if you count up all the different kinds 6 Brain Disorders, they affect everyone. Either directly or through a member of their family it might be degenerative disorders, psychiatric disorders, developmental disorders, brain injury. And right now when we think about those, we try to them individually and thats really important but they all arrive from this same system. And were stumbling around in the dark a lot of the time. We might be focused in on one area not recognizing how important it is that its getting information from other areas. So were trying to turn on lights here that will illuminate the broad realm of Brain Disorders. Just to give one extension of coreys argument. In doflingt metedz olingtss and as tom indicated thats the breakthrough really, we really need methodologies in order to move ahead. In developing methodologies also will develop methodologies that allow us to image the human brain bet we are better resolution. And thatting to help solve one of the great dilemmas in all of psychiatry. What are the biological sub strays of these major psychiatric disorders. At the moments we know very little about them. Ten years from now we will know substantially more. Well only that if we have the right tools. The problem for us now is were still, were looking inside the black box. Were better thanne were five years ago, much, much better but weve got to get better yet to be able to understand what is the precise circuitry difference between someone with depression, someone without. What is in autism that leads to the behaviors that were seeing that are so obvious but when you look at the gross brain its not there at all. Im a little more optimistic than some of the other at the table. I think there are likely to be early wins for Neurological Disorders. And i can give you a couple of examples. Right now for patients who have parkinsons disease as the disease progresses, they become less and less able to move, to speak. And one of the treatments thats used now is deep brain stimulation where electrodes are implanted in the brain in a particular region and they reset the circuit tree. Very effective but very crude. Imagine if we had a really good understanding of the neurocircuit trie that initiated behavior and how the removal of the dopamine input affected that. We could come up with a much better stimulating paradigm that would not just allow movement but could, in fact, reverse many of the things, many of the symptoms that we think of park insons. Thats one example. Another example is epilepsy. Epilepsy seizures are hyperexcite ability. Uncontrolled neuronal firing and we will get out of these studies a better way to assess circuit activity which could then allow us to very effectively predict when a seizure is coming an to stop it before it begins. So i think for some of the Neurological Disorders that there will be within the first five or more years, some applications to disease. As a human genome project has moved forwards and our understanding of the molecular biology of disease, why has neurocircuitry lagged behind . The tools that are required are different. Rose its back to tools. I think its back to tools. The molecular biology you are looking at neucletides in a string. It was hard to get that sequence and we learned a great deal about genome, human mouse and others from the sequencing technologies. If you look at the history of the genome, not just the genome project, the genetics if parallels what were talking about. They first studied viruses and bacteria, they studied very simple systems in order to see how genes function. And then they want on to progressively more complex cells and complex organisms and that is essentially what we when we started the genome project it was to get a genome. And then we began to realize it wasnt a normal genome that there is ace huge amount of variation. I think you see this as we dot human brain, initially we want to see the wiring diagram and then we are going to have to wass the variation here. What do we all what can we expect, what is the range that we should expects just as we do if genomics. We have to do a lot of these and understand how we vary. Its most compelling in the context of a whole brain in a behaving organism. So its not like you can extract the dna out of a blood cell and sequence it. You really want to understand what all those cells are doing. Tom and i were discussing earlier one example of this, helen maybergs work. So shes doing imaging of people who are depressed. And depression as we discussed here involves the whole nearal circuit in which the is an important structure. And she created people with two types of therapy. A form of psycho therapy called cognitive behavior therapy. And the other group got antidepressants. And she found these two populations separated out depending upon the level of activity in the anteriorance letter that is remarkable insight to show you that you can predict based on brain image wag kinds of they were would be better for you. And spectacular. And she then went on to use deep brain stimulation. In a different region of the brain than what would you stimulate for park insons disease an you can make the same argument that if you really understood the circuitry of depression that you could make the same kinds of advances that we believe you make with parkinsons disease with a better understanding and manipulation of the circuitry. That really transformed. We talk about these as mental disorders, but now were saying these are Brain Disorders. Its a disorder of the circuitry. Yeah, if there are arrhythmias like we tacked about in the heart then it is a different set of diagnostics an treatments potentially we ought to be thinking about. An as we will discover more about this we will be able to understand more about the treatment of mental disorders. Nd maybe not call them mental disorders. For example one thing that is emerging is helen maybergs work and otot people have shown that if you, where successful with therapy you have seen anatomical change that means psycho therapy is a biological treatment. Its not just talking to the ether it is actually having an effect on the brain. And the idea that there are mental processes and biological pro cease ease is a misconception. Bill, weigh in on here as you listen to this. Well, i would like to put some sort of bones on this dynamical activity. Lets get concrete and say what we mean by dynamics. What you are locking at here is what youre looking at here is the nervous system of a little kroture called a larval zebra fish which is about 2 millimeters long and has a huge advantage for neurobiologist that the skin is transparent with. A microscope which is what you are looking at, you can actually see these nerve cells. So every glowing orange dot you see is a nerve cell. The animal has about 100,000 nerve cells. And this group, the Research Campus has recently, i mean just literally opinion will beed in the last three months have been able to record the activity of 80,000 of these nerve cells. I mean were getting close to a real map here. Now i want to emphasize for you this animal is immobilized. There is no behavior going on that we can see because he is immobilized in basically a pool of jello, but while he is immobilized so that we can actually image the activity of these cells, you can see the dynamics of brain activity. So if we roll its video now will you start seeing these little glowing orange dots coming on and off. And those are action potential, electrical signals in realtime happening inside this nervous system. And you can see that there is this little firestorm of activity, along about 20 seconds, somewhere along in here will you see the whole brain light up instantaneously, right there. You see, what happened there. What was he thinking. What was he thinking. What are the fishs thoughts here, okay. Now this raises some really interesting issues. First of all, we are close to having a complete activity map forhis little animal and do we understand how it works . No. No, we dont understand how it works, okay. But is this shall did. I know a leading question when i hear one. Is this activity essential for understanding how it works, yes. Necessary but not sufficient. Fess but not sufficient and so where do we need in what do we need to know in addition this is what mine and coreys committee, were all trying hard to figure out. One thing we clearly need to know is which of those cells are acting together. Which one of them are coming on and offtogether. Because it gives clues how they are organized in circuits. We need mathmatician and theorists and statisticians to help us. Garden variety buy lodge buyology list biology gist doesnt have the tools for that. The secretary thing is free that animal up and have him moving, we need to see that activity map while behavior is going on so we can see which circuits are active, when the animal is swimenting or actually eating. So putting behavior together with the map and statistics to detect a codes, this is the things thatstely going turn the activity map into true understanding of a nervous testimony. That makes a wonderful point about the sociology of sciice. One wonderful thing that happened in our field is when cognitive psychology, psychology of mind fused with Brain Science to form a new science of mind, the new biology of mind this was energized by molecular biology. In each case these alien hordes came in and invaded neurobiology and enrested enriched. Were asking for further alien hord etions to come. In the field is going to grow and the president emphasized this. This is going to energize the economy, its going to provide new ideas, new directions, new jobs for people. Rose lets talk about that then. Do you have enough money to do this. I dont have enough money to go home today but. Rose is this or is this the seed money. The president said the 100 million is the first year. And he made the comment in his speech that he sees this as a longerterm commitment that will takeime and more investment. Rose you cant just do a year and say we need this more money. No one intends this a year, were thinking about the first five years but as you heard it has to go longer than that. What it will cost say little difficult to say right now but i think will you see it ramp up from 100 million in the first year to something bigger. These are tough times. Theres lots of demands on everybodys budgets. Rose so am i going to walk out tomorrow and meet some scientist somewhere who is reputable and he is going to say or shes going say to me lins, you had those five doctors, that is all fine but heres what the problem is with this Brain Initiative well what would he most likely or she most likely say to me . I think the worrying in the Scientific Community is that the creative drive of American Science has been the individual investigator. And the we want to make sure that the individual investigator does not suffer. This is american ingenuity, american creativity. Big science is very important t helps everybody including the individual investigator. But we do not in any way want to compromise what a quality rrkts o 1 grant, the ones that make it possible for a person running a small lab to continue to do outstanding science. This may actually end up really being about individuals coming up with the right ideament i wouldnt presume this is like the human genome project which was a few centers manufacturing all the sequence. We havent determined that and probably i think most of what we are hearing is the interest in getting alot of good, young people who are thinking about this in new ways working together. If you look at the brainbow that tom showed you and the optiagain edics that i showed, both of those 2508s and clarity were developed by individual scientist boss saw a problem and continentalled together the right tools and technologies to make a breakthrough which has enabled us to learn much more. It came from har varted. Jech and josh and clarity and op at this genetics came from san Federal Reserve and carl dyson. They are all on board. Absolutely. They are on the committee, two of them. There will be a change in perhaps the way that we share information. I think the idea that we will get more people together thinking about problems is, will be part of this, that well share nor data. Well need to share data with the computational people. Well need to share tools to teach each other to use the tools. That wont change the fact well still be doing individual curiosity driven experiments. Didnt the president in his remark make the point of the ethical considerations that need to be considered . And he has already enlisted his own Ethics Committee to start to consider the kinds of issues that will be raised by the project. And what are they . In the short term in Animal Studies they are a lot simp eller than in any kind of human study. You have to proceed with care and input frommettists and physicians and from patients and their families. Informed consent, patients feed to be aware what is going on wnd. And transparency in the absence of transparency. Yes. One thing that i hear in ethical question is people are afraid of mind control. If were probing this deep and were understanding this deep and were changing activity. What power does it give. Is it bad, right is this ray place we really want to go. And one thing we need to understand is that were we are exercising therapies of the mind already. Every time a doctor writes a prescription for any psycho active drug, we are actually were trying to change the brain. And what were trying to do here is develop tools that will allow us to treat, identify and treat specific disease statesltimately, much more specifically. The prescriptions are kind of a shotgun. They affect systems all over the brain. And to really help people in distress these tools are going to be important for touching individual circuits. Do some people look at this project and say this is a brain theyre in search of a brain activity map this that is what this project is about. Thats one of the things we have tried to manufacture size. We identify as broader than that opinions that brain activity meant we saw we saw in the zebra fish. We need to understand how we interconnect the logic of neurocircuitries, the logic of the human brain. What is the Committee Going to do, the advise roe committee . What are we doing. Were meeting, were meeting with a lot of different scientists, getting as much insight as we can, trying to define what we can do now and trying to find what the problems are that can be solved. Weve sort of set ourselves the goal of posing the problems rather than dictating from above what the solutions will be. And trying to bring in as many people as possible. This is what strikes me because ive been a huge advocate as eric knows of an investment in science. Im struck by the fact that there are lots of money a lot of money out there and a lot of people are interested in the future of understanding what it means to be human and every aspect of consciousness. This seems to me like a hundred million is a lot of money for this. And that they ought to be some kind of initiative to bring in to, you know, people have had the good fortune to make a lot of money and who are engaged in this we saw one example with who got interested in this and said im making a description. And it seems to me that there are ought to be a lot. This is where we are doing this program in part there ought to be a kind of recognition this is not a oneday announcement by the president. I mean this is bringing the smartest and the b bghtest minds together in neuroscience to say, you know, lets see what we can do. And lets acquire the kind of tools that we need in order to help us understand d unlock some of the secrets of what makes the brain what it is. And therefore some of the secrets of what makes the brain responsible for disorder. Right . Absolutely right, absolutely right. I think when he calls this the next Great American project he has this vision. I agree. But i mean you cant just on one press conference and then move. There has to be a Public Information project. And you have to you draw the media in to do it as well. We would love to do that. I think one the functions of this round table is to really draw the publics attention to this. And this needs to be done periodically over the next, you know, five to ten years. Sure. For example, so in august this committee is supposed to give us their first thought, september, sorry, end of the summer, beginning of the fall, their thoughts on what should be done next year. But then in december theyll have a draft of its longerterm goals and a final report in june. So we will begin to start. Now its worth thinking about the nih is currently investing 5. 5 billion dollars in brain research. So. The nih is currently investing 5. 5 billion dollars. Billion dollars. But thats spread across lots and lots of diseases, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, mental illness, psychiatric. But the last time i checked francis was rung the nih. Right. And here he is announcing the project is there some connection between that five and a half billion and this project . The thought is that this project, the first few years of this project are a small investment in providing extraordinary tools that will transform what we can do with the money that we have. So this and like one should also point out that the nih budget the way it is, even before this Brain Initiative came along was modest compared to the need out there. Right. The Scientific Community in the United States is suffering. Absolutely suffering. Good people are not being funded. Because we went through an economic recession s that it or something else. The you know, people who are investigators are fortunate. Those that are not, who are largely dependent on the neh are really suffering out there. So congress has to realize. Its interrupting research. Absolutely. Absolutely. Did is to the just the scientists suffering but there are a lot of people with Brain Disorders who depend on us to produce the new treatments. We dont have the researchch, we dont have the treatments to offer. The country needs to step up and realize, Congress Needs to step up and realize that science is underfunded at the moment. Biological science is drastically underfunded. Weve trained a workforce that is quite marvelous. Weve become the world leader in science, certainly in biological science. We willfall behind and we will not take advantage of these extraordinary gifted people we brought along. The nih this year took a 5 cut there is a 20 increase in china, india, 6 in germany and the u. K. Everybody else has recognized this. Theyre investing in this area. We are we are so lets assume this thing takes off an does all that we know it can if it works as we hope it will. What do you hope it does . For you . I mean personalize it and give me in a sense a final thought as to what it ought to answer for you because youve devoted your life to what you have. Yeah, to me its straightforward. I came into this field initially as a psychiatrist and became a neuroscientist. I believe deeply that the disorders of the mind can be understood as Brain Disorders. Thats one way to approach it. As biology. As biology. And circuitry. So understanding them as circuit problems in the human brain. And i think that this fro ject could ultimately give us the tools withhich to improve diagnosis and develop new treatments. And that would be transform difficult. Charmie charlie, im not a clinician and my father died of Alzheimer Disease recently some this is personal to me. But mi driven by keep your kosity build what it means for to us be human. A phrase you used awhile ago. I think any of us who have lived on the earth a few decades have questions about ourselve. Why is it we engage in actions that hurt people we love rather than build up people that we love. Why is that that we have such difficulty managing teenage kids an teenage kids have such difficulty managing their parents. Where does creativity come from. This is inn theas threatic sense we have with nature. And that internal reality is built in the electrical activity of billions of nearons. I wonder, how does that happen. What is the connection between here and there, behavior aand this internal mental life. So for Neurological Disorders for a number of them have very good molecular understanding. We have genes that we know cause the diseases. We understand what the cell biological consequences of mutations in those genes are and we think that those changes are relevant to cases of parkinsons or lou gehrigs disease which is are not familiar ilian or genetic. But its also very clear that circuitry changes when nerve cell its die so in your fathers case as the nerve cells were degenerating, there were changes in circuitry which may have been compensatory anan positive or may not have been. For example, alses alz patients often have abnormallal electrical activity rather than like seizures and its possible that some of the downstream consequences of neuron loss, additional neuron loss from hyperactivity so if we understood the circuits and how we could potentially manipulate or modify them i think it would be extraordinarily important not just forpsychiatric diseases but for many, many neurological des orders. So as scientists i appreciate enormously the medical poferns of understanding the brain but i think just understanding the brain say great thing for self. But were trying to understand the vocabulary of brain and grammer and ultimately how it can be used to write the works of shakespeare which is an immense human accomplishment. Im a child, is with born in 1961. I remember a man landing on the moon it was an incredible experience it was a great human accomplishment to be able to do that, not just an american plrbment. And i think bun of the things that sets us apart is that human does have science. And we have understanding and knowledge and art. And these things that we do that are larger than ourselves and understanding the brain is our grand challenge. Its what we should do. Yeah. Its what our president told to us do. Its actually sort of remarkable to be told by your command never chief that what you do is important and you should try. And how wonderful to sit there and listen thinking well, now you know, if something awful happened to me i have heard this wonderful request that we focus on how the brain, human brain works. Our scientists i have three thoughts, again, determined if good part by my personal experience. I was in vienna in 1938 when hitler march mood use troa. And i saw people who were my friends turn within hours to become my enemies. One of the social processes to turn people, to listen to mozart, beethoven, brahms one day, beat up the jews the next. What are the socialisms that how does the brain act to create a decent human being and an evil one, number one. Number two, creativity is, each w whin of us is create tough some degree. How do you enhance creativity. How do you bring it out in people. We know that under some circumstances there are brain lesions, you and i had an interview oliver and chuck both who are blind and both who are really quite creative and you could see aspects of their creativity might emerge from that but there are fundamental principleses about creativity we will learn as we do this. And finally if i may make it personal, you are knowledge longer 40 and im no longer 60 and were doing amazingly well. Youve top of your game. How does one insurance that one continues to be creative throughout much of ones life. First of all thank you, this is extraordinary for me as you well know, secondly we normally talk about what is on the next episode. And we intend to do this episode because we didnt know there would be a national initiative. What you know from mow and from eric is that we foe we are searching to look and say what ought to be the focus of this program as we sort of enlist as warriors in the effort to education you, to inform you, and in a sense to tap into your curiosity about what it is to be human what it is that makes up this remarkable thing that we call the brain and mind, consciousness and all of that. I mean these are concepts that you by nature are interested in. And what we have to do is in a sense translate that interest and curiosity to scientists and people across the spectrum of human interests, to engage in its pursuit of a lot of the answers, so we hope that this program can play a role in that. We would love to hear you about that. On behalf of evevebody at this table, thank you captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org funding for carlie rose has been provided by the cocacola company, supporting this Program Since 2002. And american express. Additional funding provided by these funders