So I'm Bill the Brain Guy. I'm here to chat with you for just the next few minutes
about interdisciplinary neuroscience
and how it's going to shape our future and I'm going to tell you three stories
basically three little vignettes
one about how neuroscience is affecting health, one about neuroscience in law
issues, and a third one about neuroscience and its application in business and economics
So let's do health first. Many of you will be aware that President Obama
announced the National Brain Initiative back in April. Those of us in neuroscience were actually
quite startled by this.
The federal science agencies have been busy planning how they're gonna respond to this.
And this was an article in NYTimes that appeared just about a week ago
announcing that one agency will focus on advancing Deep Brain Stimulation which
I'll call DBS.
how many of you have heard of deep brain stimulation? I'm just curious...
A sizeable minority! This agency astoundingly was not what you would think,
the National Institutes of Health. It was DARPA.
Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency
What in the world is DARPA doing getting involved in deep brain
stimulation? What is deep brain stimulation for that matter?
You can think of deep brain stimulation as kind of like a pacemaker for
some specific circuit in the brain. So an electrode is
surgically implanted to a target in the brain and you wear a pacemaker-like device
in your chest that keeps that thing powered up and stimulating certain circuits in your
brain 24/7 basically.
And there's about 100,000 patients now worldwide that have had these implanted
for Parkinson's Disease.
Experimentally it's being used for treating really
serious depression, OCD, essential tremor. And DARPA
is interested in treating a number of refractory diseases that
are having difficulty being dealt with by standard means.
Well this is this is pretty radical, right? You put electrodes in your brain. Why would you
do that?
So I'm going to give you this example. This is a woman,
Sybil. A resident of Georgia actually, the Atlanta area,
who had the surgery and I want to show you before,
immediately after, and a bit after her surgery. So this is from Dateline NBC News.
This is a little shot with Sybil before the surgery. Even a simple task like
eating breakfast
was a frustrating battle with her own body. How can you love your life
when you're shaking so much? It's extremely difficult sometimes,
even overwhelming. And I get very emotional. Sometimes I cry.
This is just a hard thing to do.
The disease had gotten so bad that sometimes her muscles froze completely,
making her face almost expressionless and her legs almost useless.
The woman who once was always on the go could barely move,
confined to a wheelchair. So she then,
here at Emory medical school, actually had an electrode put in one side of her
brain, and this is
catching up with Sybil. This is three days after the
after the surgery. Three days after the operation and a moment that would test Sybil's dream.
After two long years trapped in a wheelchair
would she finally be able to walk? My right arm is swinging.
I haven't felt my right arm for I don't know how long.
See, you notice she swung the right arm but not the left because she only had the
electrode on one side of her brain.
So she had a second electrode put in the brain and then they catch up with her
about four months later.
A month after her second surgery we caught up with Sybil again.
So Sybil, how do you feel? Great!
Remember that wheelchair? It was gathering dust in the garage.
What can you do now that you couldn't do before?
Sybil and Alvin had hoped for a lot from surgery,
but the outcome was better than they could have imagined.
So I have to tell you guys in all honesty this is a treatment for Parkinson's disease but is not a cure.
So Parkinson's is caused when a certain pathway in your brain, dopaminergic cells,
start dying for reasons that we still don't know. And
first line of defense is a drug therapy, L-Dopa, and many of you probably know
people who are on L-Dopa.
But eventually the amounts of drug that are necessary is just too much,
and this is a treatment that you go to next. It's a progressive disease.
This doesn't cure it,
but it can give somebody two to three years of their lives back when it works
really well.
And this is why DARPA is interested and why we're interested in starting to
tune, basically, fine tune circuits in the brain when they
get into unstable activity patterns.
So let's talk just for a minute about law.
Many of you, some of you in this audience are old enough to remember this
guy, Charles Whitman
ex-Marine, undergraduate at the University of Texas,
and he was the first of sort of the modern era of shooters.
He's the guy who climbed into the tower at the center of University of Texas with a
high-powered rifle
and shot 31 people, and in the end shot himself. And earlier in the day he had
killed his wife and his mother.
And Charles Whitman actually kept a diary, he kept notes, and it's astounding
riveting reading.
This is directly from his notes: I talked to a doctor once for about two hours and
tried to convey to him
my fears that I felt overcome by overwhelming violent impulses.
After one session I never saw the doctor again, and since then I've been fighting
my mental turmoil alone and seemingly to no avail.
After my death, I wish that an autopsy will be performed to see if there's any
visible physical disorder.
This is a guy who knew something was wrong, right? And then it was after much thought, this
was actually a note I think that was found with his body.
It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight.
I love her dearly and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever
hope to have.
I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this.
And then again: If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts.
Donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation.
Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.
And sure enough his brain was autopsied, and astoundingly he had
a tumor. And the tumor was in the
amygdala, which is circled in red right there, which is a structure that we
know is involved in control of emotions and fine-tuning emotional expression.
And it was actually impinging on the hypothalamus which is also another
major structure
known to be involved in emotion. Now this raises really important questions.
Did that cause Whitman's behavior?
We don't know and we'll never know about Whitman, but we might know
in the future. And the important questions are things like this.
I mean Whitman clearly was struggling, at a rational level
vs.his emotional impulses.
And we want to know how do these systems interact in the brain. We want to know in
what situations can antisocial
or criminal behavior be clearly attributed to brain dysfunction,
and should this matter? Can neuroscience actually speak to the issue of personal
responsibility for the law
or is it irrelevant to that issue? And ultimately can neuroscience provide useful
predictive data about the likelihood of
repeat offenses? This is something that federal judges tell us
would be most useful for Neuroscience to do... if we can give any objective data
about whether someone's likely to be a repeat offender in the future.
So let's talk about business and economics for a moment.
I trust most of you realize that when God is reaching out to touch Adam's finger
and breathe life into him, he's
doing it from inside a brain. Do you see that?
This might start a new field... the Neurotheology field, I don't know! We could,
we could find out about that! But in business, and in many walks of life, we
really want to know
why do people make the decisions they make? Can we get better at predicting
and influencing those decisions? And finally, how can we
make better decisions? Right? So there are a lot of people who would like to know
more about this. Advertisers would love to know what's going on in your brain
in order to sell you tacos... in order to get you to vote for someone they're
representing...
or to get you to listen to really socially
progressive public health and public welfare announcements.
But current tools that you have to predict the success of these
campaigns are limited and often unreliable.
So people depend a lot on their experience that's accumulated over careers.
They depend heavily on self-reports from focus groups,
and of course they just give it a try sometimes, and see whether it's a
spectacular success or whether it flops.
And here in Atlanta, some of you will remember this one, right? This is one of the
biggest flops in advertising history.
And the point is these things cost a lot of money.
And you don't know until the end. So neuromarketing, which is
a new field that I'm sure many of you have heard about, wants to dig deeper than this.
There are firms that are actually making brain activity measurements now, while
people scan advertising displays or move through stores. There are other people who are
simply trying to measure attention... the brain's attention system,
using the eyes as a proxy for attention. So where do the eyes point
when they stand in front of a display? That's a tracking of
where a person's eyes point on that photograph of a woman.
And there's other people looking at trying facial expression analysis.
So taking pictures of people's faces
when they face some sort of display or computer screen,
and analyzing what emotions are going on in there. Now
this field is still in its infancy but really when you get right down to it,
when you're a micro economist or you're trying to predict the outcome of
political campaigns, or you're trying to sell something... what you really care
about is decisions. Decisions to buy,
decisions to change your behavior, etc. And the notion is that brain
activity measurements
combined with behavioral measurements will be able ultimately to tell us
whether certain messages are tapping in well to attention systems,
memories systems in the brain, emotional engagement, and subconscious associations,
and then allow us to better predict how decisions are going to be influenced.
So, can we ultimately do this? Can we get better at predicting and
influencing decisions? The answer is maybe.
If we know more about what is going on in the brain maybe we can increase our
predictive power.
So this is why we've started the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. This, as
John Hennessy said earlier, is going to be
across the campus. It's going to include multiple schools, multiple departments,
multiple topics.
And this has just been a little taste, but if any of you want to dig deeper into
the actual science behind this,
come to my breakout session later and we'll dive deep.
Thank you.