Image: Photograph by Darren Braun
In Brief
- Neuroscientists have long been frustrated by their inability to study how the brain works in sufficiently precise detail. Unexpectedly, a solution has emerged from basic genetic research on microorganisms that rely on light-responsive “opsin” proteins to survive.
- By inserting opsin genes into the cells of the brain, scientists can now use flashes of light to trigger firing by specific neurons on command. This technology, optogenetics, permits researchers to conduct extremely precise, cell type–targeted experiments in the brains of living, freely moving animals—which electrodes and other traditional methods do not allow.
- Although optogenetics is still in its infancy, it is already yielding potentially useful insights into the neuroscience underlying some psychiatric conditions.
More In This Article
Every day as a practicing psychiatrist, I confront my field’s limitations. Despite the noble efforts of clinicians and researchers, our limited insight into the roots of psychiatric disease hinders the search for cures and contributes to the stigmatization of this enormous problem, the leading cause worldwide of years lost to death or disability. Clearly, we need new answers in psychiatry. But as philosopher of science Karl Popper might have said, before we can find the answers, we need the power to ask new questions. In other words, we need new technology.
Developing appropriate techniques is difficult, however, because the mammalian brain is beyond compare in its complexity. It is an intricate system in which tens of billions of intertwined neurons—with multitudinous distinct characteristics and wiring patterns—exchange precisely timed, millisecond-scale electrical signals and a rich diversity of biochemical messengers. Because of that complexity, neuroscientists lack a deep grasp of what the brain is really doing—of how specific activity patterns within specific brain cells ultimately give rise to thoughts, memories, sensations and feelings. By extension, we also do not know how the brain’s physical failures produce distinct psychiatric disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. The ruling paradigm of psychiatric disorders—casting them in terms of chemical imbalances and altered levels of neurotransmitters—does not do justice to the brain’s high-speed electrical neural circuitry. Psychiatric treatments are thus essentially serendipitous: helpful for many but rarely illuminating.
This article was originally published with the title Controlling the Brain with Light.
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4 Comments
Add CommentMethinks that this article is a step behind the times!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/pROSHI/
/ChuckD....
One of the possibility's of the cause of mental illness has always been from pathogens in the neural system causing dysfunction of communications or process's in the human body and having a recognizable but until now unrecognized chemical signature. Science is at it's best when it uses direct observation and the 'Scientific method " which brought us into the modern age rather than computer simulations of what if. computers can only tell you what you already know which is useful in finding quick answers to the already known but does nothing to find the unknown. hence useless in pure science maybe. when it comes to light and the human body if you look at the very broad big wheel aspect and start to put a few spokes on the wheel you would i think start with these facts.. First in nature our fresh drinking water is purified by nature by the fast running shallow flow of water in creeks or brooks where the exposure to both oxygenation and the ultraviolet spectrum from the sun kills most of the fecal bacteria and pathogens in a few hundred yards of flow on a bright sunny day. One has to recognize the fact that some of the wavelengths of light which are beneficial to humans ( we need sunlight 2 utilize vitamin d and other things ) are toxic to certain pathogens and the study of which wavelength goes with which virus or bacteria or fungus need 2 be quickly put to use in the real world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf spectrum light was used to kill pathogens in humans how ironic would it be that melanoma could be cured by... light
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(didn't they just offer an instance of that?)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLight will overcome the dance of chemistry anyway-