Instead of taking a sledgehammer approach
to brain disorders, which is what we're doing today,
with technology like Inscopix,
we can peer deep into the brain
when the subject is actually interacting with its environment.
At a NASA research facility in the heart of Silicon Valley,
neuro scientists are working on a microscopic camera
that can record individual nerve cells or neurons
as they fire inside a living working brain.
A start-up in nearby Palo Alto called Inscopix
developed this tiny device.
The company science director took me inside the NASA animal lab
where they test their product on mice - like this little guy.
So I'm going to put him back in his cage.
Right now he's doing a little bit of digging!
There's a little docking station right on the animal's head
and this allows us just to attach the microscope.
So the microscope is what you see on top.
The whole thing depends on some pretty crazy science.
They start with a special virus
and inject it into the mouse.
The virus bores into the nuclei of the furry guy's neurons
and changes DNA there so the cells will glow.
But they only glow when they're hit with a special light
and when the neurons fire off.
To see the neurons flashing,
researchers surgically implant a microscopic optical needle
into the specific part of the brain that interests them.
The microscope plugs into a brain docking station
straight out of "The Matrix"
and streams video of brain activity to a computer screen.
All while the mouse scurries on about its mousey business.
Each one of these flashing dots you see
is one brain cell.
So we're looking at a live picture of
information transmission within the brain.
That's crazy.
Do you remember the first time you ever saw this in action
and what did it feel like?
Yeah I was extremely excited.
Before, I was trying to record
from these cells you see
one cell at a time
and the very first time that I saw
this many cells, a thousand neurons light up
it was transformational.
We've had techniques to analyze the brain
on a whole scale like MRI
and we've had techniques that allowed us
to record from individual neurons.
But if you actually want to understand
how the brain functions,
we have to visualize multiple cells
that are working together
to perform a particular function
as an animal navigates its space.
Inscopix does just that.
It films brain cells
while a mouse wanders around his cage
or during an epileptic seizure.
It can even capture the symphony of neurons
inside a songbirds mind.
The brain camera started its life
as a research project at Stanford
ten years ago.
But it proved so popular,
its developers thought labs would pay to use it
even at sixty to a hundred thousand dollars a pop.
And so Inscopix was formed.
I was always a scientist, even as a little girl
and with technology like this,
it's exciting because with a
thorough understanding of how the brain
is actually operating,
we're starting to develop the ability to control it,
to potentially alleviate devastating brain disorders.
In San Francisco at the
Gladstone Institute Of Neurological Disease,
researchers use the Inscopix microscope
to live-stream the brain,
as mice make basic decisions.
Are you looking at the brain up close or what's the...?
So we're really interested in how
the brain functions during behavior.
So, we measure the behavior of mice as they
make economic decisions about what to do
and what kinds of rewards they're going to get.
What's the application in humans?
There are a number of neuropsychiatric diseases
where value based decision making has gone wrong.
Addiction I think is probably the most prominent one
in which people have decided that
obtaining and using drugs
is really the main action that they want to perform.
And then of course diseases like depression
where patients have lost the motivation to perform
any kind of action really.
As we understand more specifically
how cells control basic decisions,
we'll be able to develop entirely new strategies
for treating these diseases.
About 200 labs already use Inscopix
and the company has raised 10 million dollars in funding.
DARPA, the Pentagon sci-fi research arm
just gave them four million dollars to
create a device that can be hardwired
into the brain and restore vision for
some blind patients.
Futurists in Silicon Valley believe that
decoding how the brain works
will help us build a new generation of computers
that are more powerful because they resemble human intelligence
or maybe it'll be the other way around.
I always enjoyed a range of
sci-fi movies when I was growing up
and these concepts are coming to life
like a merging of a computer
with an active, living brain.
The sky's the limit really.