• Question: What do you find most interesting about the brain?

    Asked by anon-161180 on 8 Feb 2019.
    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 8 Feb 2019:

      Its just so complicated!
      As a scientists I’ve always wanted to know how things work. the brain is so complex with so much going on that I think there’s a mystery in there still which I love trying to work out and solve. We know lots about how the brain works, but there’s certainly a huge amount that we don’t know, and I enjoy the challenge of helping to find out!

    • Photo: Martha Nari Havenith

      Martha Nari Havenith answered on 8 Feb 2019:

      Hey atoms365, one of the things I love about brain research is that we’ve only really started studying the brain maybe 200 years ago. We are kind of like Physics was before Newton – there is just so much left to discover, and a lot of space for creativity.
      Also, I find that the brain is a beautiful example of a system that works without a ‘conductor’ or ‘pacemaker’ – millions of neurons constantly interact moment by moment, and somehow the patterns they create together translate into what we experience as thoughts, feelings, sounds, tastes etc. It’s really fun to try to imagine in my head how such a huge constantly changing system can work, and then come up with experiments that could prove that.

    • Photo: Michel Destrade

      Michel Destrade answered on 8 Feb 2019:

      There is a lot of research to understand how the brain works, but I find that too complicated! Intelligence, memory, consciousness, personality, etc., it seems just impossible to explain in my opinion.

      Instead, I look at the brain from the point of view of an engineer: what’s it made of, how soft is it, how much does it stretch or move during an impact, etc. These are questions that can be answered by testing brain matter in the lab. So far I’ve looked at pigs’ brains and found that they were softer than jelly! Good thing the brain is inside a very strong skull!

      Later I hope to move on to human brains. Maybe it will be possible to find connections between softness and disease? In fact, that’s already known for brain tumours, which feel different than the surrounding healthy tissue. So when neurosurgeons have to decide which part to remove and which part to leave, they poke around with their finger (they wear gloves, but still!) If I can come up with numbers and maps telling them that this part is 1.5 times stiffer than that part, they might be able to make more accurate judgments of where and what to cut out. That’s my hope!

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 15 Feb 2019:

      This is such a difficult question!!!! I mean, the brain is responsible for everything we are and everything we do so hard to narrow down on it! I guess lately I’m most interested in 1) memory and the different kinds of memory and how our memories aren’t the most reliable and can even be changed and altered 2) the front part of the brain (frontal lobe), which is responsible for things like our personality, inhibitions, and decision making.

    • Photo: Abbie Jordan

      Abbie Jordan answered on 14 Mar 2019:

      I don’t really focus on reserach that involves the brain but I totally agree, it is utterly fascinating. I work with children and teenagers in my research so I am in awe at how the brain changes so much over those developmental stages. It’s so clever and can accommodate so many things, particularly in younger individuals. Awesome indeed!

    • Photo: Yewande Oyekenu

      Yewande Oyekenu answered on 4 Nov 2019:

      The brain in its early stages is quite fascinating because of the rapid way it grows. I carry out cell cultures of brain cells and add different concentration of a drug called nitric oxide to see if the brain will grow faster or slower. This type of experiments are useful for accident victims that have brain injury to help give them a new portion of the damaged brain area.
      The cells i use are from the cortex.
      You can look at any neuroanatomy textbook to learn more about the different parts of the brain and their specific functions.

Comments

  • Photo: Vassilis

    Vassilis commented on :

    What an interesting question, and difficult to answer! I will try my best though! The human brain is the most complex, but amazing ‘machine’ that nature shaped, it’s responsible for what we do, what we will do in the future and how we will act – further to this, it’s also who we are as people.

    What interests me the most lately is understanding how our memory works. How do I recall every single morning that I am Vassilis? How do I know that I am who I am? In addition, I am very interested in understanding how people solve problems, a variety of problems. For example, why some people are better at solving mathematical problems and other better at solving creative problems? and how is this related to memory?

    To shine some light on our understanding, we use brain scanning machines where we look inside the brain and the activities that are taking place when someone solves a problem and we look at specific areas visual cognition (visual cortex), memory (hippocampus) and other related or unrelated areas.

  • Photo: Jane

    Jane commented on :

    Thanks for asking! It’s tough, but for me I think what’s so interesting is that a lump of what is mainly just fat and water can create our consciousness – our precious, private, wonderful, inexpressible mental life. I used to teach brain anatomy to medical students and so had the strange privilege of holding a real human brain in my hands. It was very strange and quite disturbing that this lump of inert material once brought a person into being. I cannot comprehend – and I don’t know how any of us ever fully will – how matter, how ions moving between membranes – can create our conscious experiences of our self, of hope, of the smell of honeysuckle, of the sky, of our dreams!