The Century of the Brain: How to decipher our brain.

"Science and mountain climbing have a lot of things in common. You first have to find a pick you want to climb, set yourself an “I go”, and when you look at it from the bottom you say “Well, there’s no way. I will never be able to make it up there”. But you can. You need three things. Your first need is a team of skilled, passionate and committed climbers. Then you need to study the roof, and break up the climb into manageable stages, and go through each of them, step by step, making one secure step to the other. The third thing you need is never to lose sight of the summit. You have to endure, you have to have persistence, and continue until you get there.

Well, it’s exactly the same thing in science.”

Rafael YUSTE.

How does our brain work? How am I able to feel love, pain, fear…? How my thoughts and my emotions take life to make me who I am? How can I perceive a flower or recognize Jennifer Aniston and link her to the TV Show F.R.I.E.N.D.S.?

Those questions are the ones that Rafael Yuste and other scientists are trying to answer. Our brain is a gigantic machine, a complex piece of matter that creates feelings, sentiments and thinking. In the end, it creates us: who we are.

Rafael Yuste is a neuroscientist passionate by the brain. In October 2014, the magazine Scientific American published “The New Century of the Brain: Revolutionary tools will reveal how thoughts and emotions arise”, a collaborative article he wrote with George Church, in which they explain how we are ignorant about the brain.

When you watch TV shows, movies or documentaries, you see beautiful pictures of cross-sections of brains, and videos where you can see some parts which are stimulated by the patient’s activity. But when we look deeper, we see that those images are illusions, and Yuste is here to make us remember that we have a long way to go to understand the mechanism of our brain.

The human brain in numbers: 
- 3.3 pound mass;
- 85 billions of neurons;
- The same number of non-neuronal cells;
- 10¹⁵  synaptic connexions;
- 20% of the oxygen’s consummation of the body.

A single neuron, all alone, is not intelligent. It’s the first thing that Yuste explains in the “Appendix E” of the Neural Network researches. As you know now, the number of neurons in our brain is gigantic. It was the first thing that surprised me. But more than that, it is what I learned from those articles that impressed me: admittedly, understand a single neuron is really important to understand 85 billions. But most important, it is the connexions between them that it is primordial: how they work together, how they are connected with each other, and how those interactions can create intelligence, feelings or sentiments. We already have succeeded to map the neuronal connexions of a worm (the Caenorhabditis Elegans) which has only 302 neurons…

For sure, we have methods which allow us to map the connexions, but unfortunately not to understand them. The most efficient is the Connectomic method, which permit us to see the directions that take neurons with different colors: red for left to right, green for ahead to behind and blue for above to under.

To be clear about the real gap we still have to cross, I have to explain that we need more than a picture. We need to see the interactions directly, we need to be able to “document the constantly varying electrical signals that product specific cognitive processes”. Therefore, we need new technologies, like nanotechnology which uses the molecular scale, a technique that could be very accurate.

Yuste made a short conference in 2007 that can be found on Youtube, in response to the decision of Obama to increase the research on the brain. From this decision, a project has been created, combining 50 researchers, named the BRAIN Initiative. Their goals are to understand our brain but also to be able in the future to cure mental illness or neuronal diseases like Schizophrenia or Alzheimer.

Rafael Yuste is a professor in biology and neuroscience who works in the Columbia University. He is the co-director of the Kavli Foundation in brain research.

- "Circuit neuroscience: the road ahead" Yuste, Frontiers in Neuroscience (2008)

- "Rafael Yuste: What understanding the brain means to science and medicine” TEDMED :