The Future of the Most Important Human Brain

mattnyc99 writes "About a year ago, we watched live as neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese sliced the brain of Memento-style patient Henry Molaison (aka H.M.) into 2,401 pieces. Since even before then, writer Luke Dittrich — whose grandfather happened to be the surgeon to accidentally slice open the H.M. skull in the first place — has been tracking Annese and a new revolution in brain science. From the article in Esquire: 'If Korbinian Brodmann created the mind's Rand McNally, Jacopo Annese is creating its Google Maps. ... With his Brain Observatory, Annese is setting out to create not the world's largest but the world's most useful collection of brains. ... For the first time, we'll be able to meaningfully and easily compare large numbers of brains, perhaps finally understanding why one brain might be less empathetic or better at calculus or likelier to develop Alzheimer's than another. The Brain Observatory promises to revolutionize our understanding of how these three-pound hunks of tissue inside our skulls do what they do, which means, of course, that it promises to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.'"

Comments

An odd approach...

[Rival]

While I have no wish to demean their efforts, this approach still seems somewhat brutal to me. I'm no neurologist, but isn't this still a rather macro-level view of things, with the cutting process still causing damage to the fine structures they want to study?

It seems likely to me that future scientists will look back at this in not too long with stifled laugher and perhaps a little shock at the approach.

Re:An odd approach...

[Raenex]

There are lots of ways to image and study the brain. This is just one more. Sure, in a hypothetical future they might be able to scan it down to the finest detail, but for now we do what we can.

Re:An odd approach...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It almost certainly is disrupting fine structures or details of network connections that future neurologists might want to study; but I suspect that this is one of those situations where they don't really have a choice.

The brain is extremely complex, and nondestructive imaging methods are either expensive, low-resolution, or both. Good old slice-n-stain, with a dash of modern robotics, is cheap and high resolution.

Since we know so little about how brains actually work, it isn't a bad idea to just build a giant dataset, using an economic and high-resolution technique, and hope that that dataset allows future researchers to pinpoint more closely what they should actually be looking for.

Given that the supply of brains donated to science, while not huge, can be reasonably expected to continue into the indefinite future, starting with destructive; but quick, reverse engineering steps, and then gradually progressing down to finer, more focused ones, seems pretty sensible.

A lot of the brains thus sliced will, it is true, be destroyed as far as the researchers of the future are concerned; but slicing them may be the only way to get the researchers of the future to a position of sufficient knowledge.

Re:An odd approach...

[TapeCutter]

Or as Douglas Adams put it - "If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."

Re:An odd approach...

[DerekLyons]

While I have no wish to demean their efforts, this approach still seems somewhat brutal to me. I'm no neurologist, but isn't this still a rather macro-level view of things, with the cutting process still causing damage to the fine structures they want to study?

Do you have a better way? Seriously, it's not like they haven't spent the better part of a century working out the sectioning techniques and steadily improving them.
 

It seems likely to me that future scientists will look back at this in not too long with stifled laugher and perhaps a little shock at the approach.

The same way we react in shock to those who operated without anesthesia. Or laugh at the Greeks who tried to cure tuberculosis with leeches and a poultice of wine must and sea urchin gonads. (I don't know if they did exactly that, but it's typical of the medicine of the era.) They didn't have a better way, neither do we. We do the best we can with what we know.

Re:An odd approach...

[interkin3tic]

but isn't this still a rather macro-level view of things, with the cutting process still causing damage to the fine structures they want to study?

No, the cryostat is designed to preserve things down to the subcellular level. Had they just cut it up with a scalpel, yeah, that would not preserve much. Fixing it with, say, paraformaldehyde, then freezing it and sectioning it, the sections do okay if you're skilled at it. You can see down to the neuron level.

It seems likely to me that future scientists will look back at this in not too long with stifled laugher and perhaps a little shock at the approach.

I personally am always astounded at what past scientists were able to accomplish with the tools at hand. Ramon Y Cajal, the "father of neuroscience" had primitive microscopes and a method of staining cells that sounds exhausting, but described the brain in astonishing detail. I personally doubt I could have accomplished what he did with the tools we have now. Unless future scientists are idiots, they'll likely realize that these are the best tools we have now.

Re:An odd approach...

[sznupi]

As opposed to working cat before? What's that?

(/me looks around...yup, the beast sleeps; on the coffer this time)

Re:An odd approach...

[Whomp-Ass]

The major problem is that at the point of death (or at least, brain-death) is that the dendrites of the neurons detach from the axons of the surrounding neurons at about a rate that is the square of the of the difference over time of the inverse of temperature loss...meaning, by the time you slice-and-dice, the important bit (that is, the bits, rather...the connections and pathways that make you...well, you...are gone).

Re:An odd approach...

[Sulphur]

Much later: A physician was asked what course not in Med School contributed most to his career.

Carpentry.

Re:An odd approach...

[CrimsonAvenger]

She said the weapons they used on the soldiers at the time also helped to crank up the barbarism, with soldiers often loading chains, nails, and anything else they could find into cannons when they ran out of shells.

This is not so likely to be historically correct as one might suppose. Fact is, what they fired out of cannons back then wasn't loose powder and shot, but a single bag containing powder and a cannonball. In other words, if you don't have any cannonballs (not shells), then you've got no powder to shoot nails and chains.

Sure we already knew about anesthesia, but good luck finding any in a muddy field hospital in the middle of TN with a battle going on.

Ether was used more than you might suppose in the Civil War. At least by the Union, who could afford to make the stuff and had the wherewithal to deliver it in quantity to their armies.

Troops and doctors on both sides simply didn't realize it was gonna be such a hideous war, believing it would be a "gentlemen's conflict" like the revolutionary war.

Anyone who believed in 1861 that the Revolutionary War was a "gentlemen's conflict" was so deluded about history that he can be excused for thinking that the Civil War was going to be one. Alas, history doesn't agree about the nature of the Revolutionary War.

Note, for reference, that the people who tended to think in terms of "gentelmen's war" were mostly Southern aristocrats. Most of the soldiers on both sides weren't able to kid themselves that standing on a battlefield with 30,000+ other people trying to kill you was going to be a friendly sort of affair.

a muddy field hospital in the middle of TN with a battle going on

Oddly enough, I had a great-great-grandfather in just such a situation. Battle of Franklin, in fact.

Re:An odd approach...

[ultranova]

It seems likely to me that future scientists will look back at this in not too long with stifled laugher and perhaps a little shock at the approach.

Probably. "Look at these barbarians, who didn't use tools and methods which weren't invented until later!" It's not unlike the recent story deriding Newton for being an alchemist, despite that being entirely reasonable at his time - it makes the rest of us who couldn't invent Calculus or the Laws of Motion feel better.

It's one of the more pathetic aspects of human nature.

Re:An odd approach...

[uninformedLuddite]

simple solution - start with a live brain and work quickly

Re:An odd approach...

[DanTheStone]

The eulogy, or at least some references to it (like the quote), are in The Salmon of Doubt. A worthwhile read if you haven't read it.

Clearly this is a front organization

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly this a front organization--for zombies!

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[h4rr4r]

No, someone's intelligence or outlook on the world is a combination of upbringing, willpower and education. Anyone could be as intelligent and knowledgeable as they wanted to be, if they wanted to be.

How young are you?
This is one of the most naive things I have ever heard. Some folks are never going to be rocket surgeons.That might not be ok with the current everyone is a genius and everyone gets a trophy crowd but it is the truth.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[LoudMusic]

This is so unbelievably unintelligent that if it weren't so long I might think it was a joke.

I often resort to extreme examples when explaining the ability for variations to people who deny variations exist. So with that in mind, an extreme example of a different kind of brain would be the autistic mind. Clearly it is different. It has little to nothing to do with the way the person was raised or educated over time. It is how their brain was created. If a brain can be created to that extreme of difference why not changed in more subtle ways that allow enhanced mathematical capabilities or greater empathy.

Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen or exist.

The whole point of science and these studies is to figure these things out. To learn about the things we can't see but effect our daily lives.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[jelizondo]

Sorry to disagree with you, but clearly the physical properties of the brain matter.

Which physical properties? Well, we need to find out.

Think about it for a while. All my life I would have given a leg and an arm to learn to play any musical instrument (went to schools for years) and could never get beyond the really easy stuff; a seven year-old child could out-play me every time. But I have a gift for analisys and abstraction, thus I'm good at writing software.

You say upbringing, education and will-power. Well I had all three: mom was a music director who wrote music and poetry, I went to very good music schools and I yearned to be able to play music; I simply don't have the right "hardware".

Try running Deep Blue's software in your bog standard PC, see how far it gets.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[MithrandirAgain]

I've often found the people that never get fantastic jobs/lives, don't care about that anyway.
Maybe that's the sour-grape syndrome though...

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[Anonymous Coward]

Affect

Not sure how useful this is

[WillAffleckUW]

Here at the UW we harvest thousands of brains for various medical studies, and generally freeze half of the brain and slice up the other half and stain that half with various dyes, while taking electrical and other measurements within a few hours of death.

While an approach like this described in the article might be useful for things like Pick's Disease, it would pretty much prove useless for Alzheimer's Disease, since that is an age-appropriate measurement of tangles and neurolytic fibers.

Things like childhood diseases or other gross abnormalities might be interesting.

But if you want to know if you'll get Alzheimer's it has a lot more to do with the exact APOE genes you carry and your general cardiovascular health and brain injury risk factors than it does other stuff. And by the time you harvest these brains it's way too late.

And things like Parkinson's are more about mitochondrial failure to function correctly than about general brain health - it's not just your brain, it's the rest of your body too.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[metrix007]

You're argument has so much more authority when you use insults...

Anyway

I am not denying variations in brain exist. I am saying teh variations in brains are about as meaningful as variations in livers, and are not the causes for different types and levels of intelligence in people.

Your use of an autistic mind as an analogy is interesting, but flawed. An autistic mind is a defective brain. Using my PC analogy before, an autistic mind is the equivalent of only being able to boot in single user mode.

Sorry, but I have read a lot on this and never found anything to meaningfully support that differences in the physical brain correspond to personality or intelligence. The differences in brains influence our personality or intelligence just as much as the differences in our livers or hair.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[h4rr4r]

Tone deafness could be the result of brain structure for all we know at this point.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[Naturalis Philosopho]

I was going to mod you troll, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you really do believe that all brains are created equal- but in that case, and by your own argument, you must not be very motivated or lack the discipline to learn the truth of the matter. I wonder what could account for that?

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[RockoTDF]

Well, if I made a few changes to some genes your brain would be about as useful as a liver. Are you trolling? Because you are basically arguing against half a century of research in the cognitive and neural sciences with no evidence.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[EdIII]

But I have a gift for analisys and abstraction, thus I'm good at writing software.

You should put those programming skills to use creating a spell checker :)

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[Bruce Perens]

This illness for which H.M. is studied is one with gross pathology that should be very visible with the method used. The study of Einstein's brain did the most important thing that a scientific experiment can do: it falsified a hypothesis. Nobody really knew that Einstein did not have gross pathology until they looked. This is not to say that the person who kept Einstein's brain in a jar on his desk for his whole life had any right to do that, but preserving the brain for the imaging tools of a later generation was a good idea.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[h4rr4r]

I made no claim that they would.

My only claim was that some people lack the capacity to do so and that may be and most likely is a result of differences in the brain.

A tad overrated

[RockoTDF]

HM was certainly a very important brain, but not *the* most important. There are plenty of patients out there with very similar injuries that have yielded equally (if not more) important discoveries. It is frustrating to see someone present research on medial temporal lobe damage that contradicts studies with HM and see other people be like "But HM!." They have to be reminded that six patients tested with superior methodologies to those around 30-50 years ago should come out on top. He made valuable contributions, but as a field I'd like to see memory research move on from HM.

Re:A tad overrated

[RockoTDF]

Except there are LOTS of things rats can't learn, or that we can't ask them (...which is everything since they don't speak!). Not at all open and shut.

Re:A tad overrated

[Waffle Iron]

Make them learn stuff, damage their brains and try teaching them new stuff.

My friends and I survived that very experiment back in my college days. We used the "weekly drink special" methodology.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[metrix007]

Wait, a simpler analogy.

If you buy a new car and there is a problem with cruise control, does that mean it is correct to infer that there may be cars of the same model that have significantly better cruise control?

That is the leap you are making, and it is not supported, either logically or with our observations.

It is being done for the heart

[npuzzle]

The same applies to the dissection of other organs as well. For instance, any dissection of the heart is inherently biased towards the cutting planes defined by the dissector (source). The true arrangement of muscle fibers in the left ventricle of the heart (more precisely the existence of sheet structure) is still a subject of hot debate because of this. Obviously, one might think that by now, we should be able to just pick an organ and throw it into the best relevant imaging scanner (CT, MRI, PET, etc.). The truth is, there is still anatomical information that even state-of-the-art medical imaging modalities cannot reliably reveal.

As an example, consider DT-MRI that measures the diffusion of water molecules along the tissue fibers in an organ. The discretization in the data is such that only the local average orientation of the diffusion of water is known at any given location. To obtain more useful anatomical information, the full fiber pathway in a region needs to be reconstructed, a task called fiber tractography. Different computational methods based on different anatomical assumptions lead to results that are often contradictory (as is the case in the heart models described in the article cited above) and since there is no ground truth (remember that the dissection is biased), we currently hit a dead-end.

Hopefully, as more dissections (like this one) are performed and the data is made available publicly, we will eventually be able to faithfully reconcile pieces of what we observe in medical conditions, in medical scanners, and on the dissection table.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[cptdondo]

Anyone with that aspiration can teach themselves what they need to, go to school or get training, and do it. Especially for that type of discipline(physics/math) where prerequisite knowledge is more important than original thinking.

You're not serious, are you?

You mean I can train myself to have perfect pitch, like some musicians? Or to have perfect color sense, like artists? Or a deep understanding of multiple dimensions?

That's like saying that we can all play basketball like Wilt Chamberlain, or ride a bike like Lance Armstrong.

Each brain is drastically different, each is capable of different things. No amount of training will make my daughter an engineer like her brother in spite of her nearly perfect math skills. No amount of training will give my son the empathy to deal with animals like his sister has.

Brains are as different as our bodies, and no amount of training will let me run a marathon; my body won't allow it. For some, no amount of training will let them keep up with me on a bicycle.

No amount of training will let most people keep up with me in my field of intellectual expertise; I have great vision in that one area, and I'm a total doofus in others.

Yeah, I can learn to flip burgers. But that won't let me compete with an accomplished chef, who has talent and vision.

Oblig. "Youing Frankenstein" quote

[Kittenman]

Dr. Frankenstein: [To Igor] Igor, may I speak to you for a moment?

Igor: Of course.

Dr. Frankenstein: Sit down, won't you?

Igor: Thank you. [sits on the floor]

Dr. Frankenstein: No no, up here.

Igor: Thank you. [sits on a chair]

Dr. Frankenstein: Now... that brain that you gave me... was it Hans Delbruck's?

Igor: [Crosses arms] No.

Dr. Frankenstein: [Holds up hand] Ah. Good. Uh... would you mind telling me... whose brain... I did put in?

Igor: And you won't be angry?

Dr. Frankenstein: I will not be angry.

Igor: [Shrugs] Abby someone.

Dr. Frankenstein: Abby someone? Abby who?

Igor: Abby Normal.

Dr. Frankenstein: [Slightly angry] Abby Normal?

Igor: I'm almost sure that was the name. [He and Dr. Frankenstein laugh]

Dr. Frankenstein: Are you saying... [Stands] that I put an abnormal brain... [Puts hand on Igor's hump] into a 7 and a half foot long... 54- inch wide... [Grabs Igor by throat] GORILLA?!?!?! [Strangling Igor] IS THAT WHAT YOU'RE TELLING ME!?!

Ourselves?

[Anonymous Coward]

which means, of course, that it promises to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.'"

You might think you are nothing more than your brain, but I am really my soul.* The brain is just a channel to communicate the will to the body.

---

* "Soul" in this context means "testicles."

Still...

[denzacar]

I can't escape a feeling that what they are doing is akin to slicing apples and then taking high grain black and white photos of those slices - in order to find out how they taste.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[jelizondo]

The Funny English Language

No wonder the English language is so very difficult to learn.
I sometimes wonder how we manage to communicate at all!
We'll begin with a box and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.

The one fowl is a goose but two are called geese
, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may found a lone mouse or a whole set of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

If I speak of a foot and you show me your feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why should not the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural wouldn't be hose.
And the plural of cat is cats and not cose.

We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say Mother, we never say Methren,

Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim, So English, I fancy you will all agree,
Is the funniest language you ever did see.

Why can’t people from all over the world speak English?

The most important thing is...

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

...whether we can still put into a great white shark.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[fractoid]

Let me try that again: Some people don't really give a shit about how much money, power, knowledge or fame they get. If someone finds physics interesting, that doesn't mean they're going to become a rocket scientist, or have any desire to do so.

The GGP was stating that there are distinct physiological differences between people, which result in profound differences in ability. You seem to be supporting the GP's assertion that a person's intellectual ability is purely a product of their environment, and also claiming that people who don't achieve much fail to do so because of lack of motivation, not because of lack of intelligence.

If you've ever tried to teach a complex skill (programming, mathematics, music) to a group of people, you'll know that intrinsic human aptitude for a given task varies dramatically from person to person. Some people understand intricate systems effortlessly, while others will never 'get' systems above a certain level of complexity. All of us hit the wall somewhere, but that 'somewhere' ranges from 'ability to understand why maxing out your credit card is bad' to 'some of the finer points of quantum physics'.

Re:This is simply misguided -- don't we know bette

[fractoid]

Our society has near-universal reading and writing skills, true. For anything more advanced, though, I think we're starting to see the limits of 'the average' human's capability. Consider that despite decades of widespread attempts to teach scientific method and basic mathematics in schools, we still have almost universal scientific and mathematical illiteracy.

"accidentally slice open the H.M. skull"?

[chrb]

"whose grandfather happened to be the surgeon to accidentally slice open the H.M. skull in the first place"

The surgery was no accident - it was a planned procedure that the doctors (correctly) thought would stop the epileptic seizures that H.M. was experiencing.

Please destroy my childhood more..

[RulerOf]

I am really my soul.*

...

* "Soul" in this context means "testicles."

I really, really hope you appreciate how incredibly gay you just made Mortal Kombat.