16 SCIENCE NEWS | March 13, 2021GLENN HARVEYFEATUREA fantastical view of neuroscience
has roots in recent research advances
By Laura SandersOur Brains,
Our Futures
To celebrate our upcoming 100th anniversary, we’ve launched
a series that highlights some of the biggest advances in science
over the last century. For more on the story of the human brain,
and to see the rest of the series as it appears, visit the
Century of Science site at http://www.sciencenews.org/centuryA
century ago, science’s understanding of the brain
was primitive, like astronomy before telescopes.
Certain brain injuries were known to cause specific
problems, like loss of speech or vision, but those
findings offered a fuzzy view.
Anatomists had identified nerve cells, or neurons, as key
components of the brain and nervous system. But nobody
knew how these cells collectively manage the brain’s sophis-
ticated control of behavior, memory or emotions. And nobody
knew how neurons communicate, or the intricacies of their
connections. For that matter, the research field known as
neuro science — the science of the nervous system — did not
exist, becoming known as such only in the 1960s.
Over the last 100 years, brain scientists have built their
telescopes. Powerful tools for peering inward have revealed
cellular constellations. It’s likely that over 100 different kinds
of brain cells communicate with dozens of distinct chemicals.
A single neuron, scientists have discovered, can connect to tens
of thousands of other cells.
Yet neuroscience, though no longer in its infancy, is far from
mature.
Today, making sense of the brain’s vexing complexity is
harder than ever. Advanced technologies and expanded
computing capacity churn out torrents of information. “We
have vastly more data ... than we ever had before, period,”
says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute in
Seattle. Yet we still don’t have a satisfying explanation of how
the brain operates. We may never understand brains in the way
we understand rainbows, or black holes, or DNA.Deeper revelations may come from studying the vast
arrays of neural connections that move information from
one part of the brain to another. Using the latest brain map-
ping technologies, scientists have begun drawing detailed
maps of those neural highways, compiling a comprehensive
atlas of the brain’s communication systems, known as the
connectome.
Those maps are providing a more realistic picture than early
work that emphasized the roles of certain brain areas over the
connections among them, says Michael D. Fox, a neuroscien-
tist who directs the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Scientists now know that the dot on the map is less impor-
tant than the roads leading in and out.
“With the building of the human connectome, this wir-
ing diagram of the human brain, we all of a sudden had the
resources and the tools to begin to look at [the brain] differ-
ently,” Fox says.
Scientists are already starting to use these new brain maps
to treat disorders. That’s the main goal of Fox’s center, dedi-
cated to changing brain circuits in ways that alleviate disorders
such as Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder
and depression. “Maybe for the first time in history, we’ve got
the tools to map these symptoms onto human brain circuits,
and we’ve got the tools to intervene and modulate these cir-
cuits,” Fox says.
The goal sounds grandiose, but Fox doesn’t think it’s a
stretch. “My deadline is a decade from now,” he says.
Whether it’s 10 years from now or 50, by imagining what’s
ahead, we can remind ourselves of the progress that’s already
been made, of the neural galaxies that have been discovered
and mapped. And we can allow ourselves a moment of wonder
at what might come next.
The three fictional vignettes that follow illustrate some of
those future possibilities. No doubt they will be wrong in the
details, but each is rooted in research that’s under way today,
as described in the “reality checks” that follow each imagined
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