Today I want to tell you about a project being carried out by scientists all over the world to paint a neural portrait of the human mind. And the central idea of this work is that the human mind and brain is not a single, general-purpose processor, but a collection of highly specialized components, each solving a different specific problem, and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers. To give you a feel for this idea,
Danas vam želim govoriti o projektu provođenom od strane znanstvenika cijelog svijeta za stvaranje neurološkog portreta ljudskog uma. Glavna ideja ovog rada je prikaz kako ljudski um i mozak nisu pojedinačni procesori općenite namjene već zbirka visoko specijaliziranih dijelova, gdje svaki riješava drugi specifični problem, a ipak kolektivno objedinjujući ono što nas čini ljudskim bićima i misliocima Kako bi vam približila ovu ideju,
imagine the following scenario: You walk into your child's day care center. As usual, there's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up, but this time, the children's faces look weirdly similar, and you can't figure out which child is yours. Do you need new glasses? Are you losing your mind? You run through a quick mental checklist. No, you seem to be thinking clearly, and your vision is perfectly sharp. And everything looks normal except the children's faces. You can see the faces, but they don't look distinctive, and none of them looks familiar, and it's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter.
zamislite slijedeći scenarij: ulazite u dječji vrtić, kao i obično, tucet djece čeka da netko dođe po njih ali ovog puta sva dječja lica izgledaju začuđujuće slično i nemožete shvatiti koje dijete je vaše. Trebate li možda nove naočale? Gubite li razum? Brzo provedete mentalnu provjeru. Ne, izgleda da ste prisebni i vid vam je savršeno jasan. Sve izgleda normalno, osim dječjih lica. Možete vidjeti lica, ali ne izgledaju karakteristično, nijedno vam se ne čini poznato, jedino primjećujući narančastu vrpcu za kosu pronalazite svoju kćer.
This sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people. It's called prosopagnosia, and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain. The striking thing about it is that only face recognition is impaired; everything else is just fine.
Ovaj iznenadni gubitak sposobnosti prepoznavanja lica zapravo događa se mnogim ljudima. Zove se prozopagnozija, posljedica je oštećenja posebnog dijela mozga. Zapanjujuća činjenica vezana za to jest da je jedino mogućnost prepoznavanja lica oštećena, dok je sve ostalo u redu.
Prosopagnosia is one of many surprisingly specific mental deficits that can happen after brain damage. These syndromes collectively have suggested for a long time that the mind is divvied up into distinct components, but the effort to discover those components has jumped to warp speed with the invention of brain imaging technology, especially MRI. So MRI enables you to see internal anatomy at high resolution, so I'm going to show you in a second a set of MRI cross-sectional images through a familiar object, and we're going to fly through them and you're going to try to figure out what the object is. Here we go.
Prozopagnozija je jedna od mnogih iznenađujuće specifičnih mentalnih nedostataka koji se javljaju nakon oštećenja mozga. Ovi sindromi zajedno već dugo vremena sugeriraju podjeljenost uma u različite komponente, ali napor da se te komponente istraže je nevjerovatno ubrzan izumom tehnologije snimanja mozga, posebice snimanjem magnetskom rezonancijom (MR). MR nam dakle omogućuje uvid u unutarnju anatomiju u visokoj rezoluciji, sada ću vam pokazati set MR-snimaka poprečnog presjeka kroz poznate objekte, zajedno ćemo ih preletjeti a vi ćete pokušati shvatiti koji je objekt u pitanju. Krenimo.
It's not that easy. It's an artichoke.
Nije toliko jednostavno.To je artičoka.
Okay, let's try another one, starting from the bottom and going through the top. Broccoli! It's a head of broccoli. Isn't it beautiful? I love that.
OK,probajmo drugu. Počinje od dna i ide prema vrhu. Brokula! To je glava brokule. Nije li predivno? Obožavam to.
Okay, here's another one. It's a brain, of course. In fact, it's my brain. We're going through slices through my head like that. That's my nose over on the right, and now we're going over here, right there.
OK, evo još jedna. Ovo je mozak, naravno. Zapravo to je moj mozak. Prolazimo kroz režnjeve moje glave. To je moj nos,na desno, a sada idemo ovdje.
So this picture's nice, if I do say so myself, but it shows only anatomy. The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity, that is, where neurons are firing. So here's how this works. Brains are like muscles. When they get active, they need increased blood flow to supply that activity, and lucky for us, blood flow control to the brain is local, so if a bunch of neurons, say, right there get active and start firing, then blood flow increases just right there. So functional MRI picks up on that blood flow increase, producing a higher MRI response where neural activity goes up.
Ova slika je lijepa, ako mene pitate. Ali pokazuje samo anatomiju. Veliki napredak funkcionalnim oslikavanjem nastao je kada su znanstvenici otkrili kako napraviti slike koje ne pokazuju samo anatomiju, već i aktivnost, odnosno mjesto gdje se neuroni aktiviraju. Dakle, evo kako to funkcionira. Mozgovi su kao mišići. Kada se aktiviraju, trebaju povećan dotok krvi za opskrbu, srećom za nas, kontrola dotoka krvi u mozak je lokalna, te kada se skup neurona, recimo ovdje, aktivira i počnu odašiljati, tada se dotok krvi poveća baš na tom mjestu. Dakle funkcionalna magnetska rezonanca detektira povećan dotok krvi, te proizvodi veći magetno rezonantni odziv na mjestu povećane neuronske aktivnosti.
So to give you a concrete feel for how a functional MRI experiment goes and what you can learn from it and what you can't, let me describe one of the first studies I ever did. We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for recognizing faces, and there was already reason to think there might be such a thing based on this phenomenon of prosopagnosia that I described a moment ago, but nobody had ever seen that part of the brain in a normal person, so we set out to look for it. So I was the first subject. I went into the scanner, I lay on my back, I held my head as still as I could while staring at pictures of faces like these and objects like these and faces and objects for hours. So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner, I can tell you that one of the skills that's really important for MRI research is bladder control. (Laughter)
Kako bi bolje razumijeli izvođenje eksperimenta uz pomoć funkcionalnog MRI, te što možete naučiti a što ne, opisat ću vam jedno od prvih istraživanja koje sam provela. Zanimalo nas je postoji li poseban dio mozga zadužen za prepoznavanje lica, već je postojao razlog za takvu pretpostavku na temelju fenomena prozopagnozije koji sam opisala maloprije, no nitko nikada nije vidio taj dio mozga u normalne osobe, pa smo se odlučili na njegovo pronalaženje. Ja sam bila prvim predmetom istraživanja. Ušla sam pod skener, legla na leđa, držala glavu što sam mirnije mogla dok sam gledala slike ovakvih lica i ovakvih objekta, lica i objekte satima. Kao osoba koja je bila vrlo blizu svjetskom rekordu po broju sati provedenih u skeneru magnetne rezonance mogu reći da jedna od vještina vrlo važnih za MR istraživanja jest vještina kontrole mokraćnog mjehura. (Smijeh)
When I got out of the scanner, I did a quick analysis of the data, looking for any parts of my brain that produced a higher response when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects, and here's what I saw. Now this image looks just awful by today's standards, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. What it shows is that region right there, that little blob, it's about the size of an olive and it's on the bottom surface of my brain about an inch straight in from right there. And what that part of my brain is doing is producing a higher MRI response, that is, higher neural activity, when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects. So that's pretty cool, but how do we know this isn't a fluke? Well, the easiest way is to just do the experiment again. So I got back in the scanner, I looked at more faces and I looked at more objects and I got a similar blob, and then I did it again and I did it again and again and again, and around about then I decided to believe it was for real. But still, maybe this is something weird about my brain and no one else has one of these things in there, so to find out, we scanned a bunch of other people and found that pretty much everyone has that little face-processing region in a similar neighborhood of the brain.
Kada sam izašla iz skenera, brzo sam analizirala podatke, tražeći djelove svog mozga koji su proizveli veću aktivnost za vrijeme gledanja lica nego gledajući objekte, ovo sam uočila. Prema današnjim standardima ova slika izgleda užasno, no tada sam mislila da je prekrasna. Pokazuje taj dio, tamo, taj mali grumen, otprilike veličine masline a nalazi se na dnu površine moga mozga otprilike 2.5 cm od ovdje. Ono što taj dio mog mozga radi je proizvodi veću fMR reakciju, odnosno veću moždanu aktivnost, dok gledam lica nego dok gledam objekte. To je prilično dobro, no kako možemo znati da ovo nije slučajnost? Najlakši način, jest da ponovno provedemo eksperiment. Vratila sam se pod skener, gledala sam više lica i više objakata i dobila sam sličan grumen, tada sam ponovila još jednom i još jednom i još jednom, i otprilike tada sam odlučila da ću vjerovati da je stvarno tako. Možda je nešto čudno s mojim mozgom i nitko drugi nema ništa slično, te kako bi saznali, skenirali smo i druge ljude i saznali da skoro svi imaju to malo područje za prepoznavanje lica, na sličnom mjestu u mozgu.
So the next question was, what does this thing really do? Is it really specialized just for face recognition? Well, maybe not, right? Maybe it responds not only to faces but to any body part. Maybe it responds to anything human or anything alive or anything round. The only way to be really sure that that region is specialized for face recognition is to rule out all of those hypotheses. So we spent much of the next couple of years scanning subjects while they looked at lots of different kinds of images, and we showed that that part of the brain responds strongly when you look at any images that are faces of any kind, and it responds much less strongly to any image you show that isn't a face, like some of these.
Slijedeće pitanje je bilo, čemu to područje zapravo služi? Je li usko specijalizirano samo za prepoznavanje lica? Možda i nije, zar ne? Možda ne reagira samo na lica već na bilo koji dio tijela. Možda reagira na sve ljudsko ili na sve živo ili sve okruglo. Jedini način da budemo zaista sigurni kako je to područje specijalizirano samo za prepoznavanje lica je da isključimo sve ostale hipoteze. Proveli smo sljedećih nekoliko godina skenirajući osobe koje su gledale mnoštvo različitih slika i pokazali smo da taj dio mozga reagira kada gledamo slike koje pokazuju lica bilo koje vrste, a slabije reagira na sliku koja nije slika lica, kao neke od ovih.
So have we finally nailed the case that this region is necessary for face recognition? No, we haven't. Brain imaging can never tell you if a region is necessary for anything. All you can do with brain imaging is watch regions turn on and off as people think different thoughts. To tell if a part of the brain is necessary for a mental function, you need to mess with it and see what happens, and normally we don't get to do that. But an amazing opportunity came about very recently when a couple of colleagues of mine tested this man who has epilepsy and who is shown here in his hospital bed where he's just had electrodes placed on the surface of his brain to identify the source of his seizures. So it turned out by total chance that two of the electrodes happened to be right on top of his face area. So with the patient's consent, the doctors asked him what happened when they electrically stimulated that part of his brain. Now, the patient doesn't know where those electrodes are, and he's never heard of the face area. So let's watch what happens. It's going to start with a control condition that will say "Sham" nearly invisibly in red in the lower left, when no current is delivered, and you'll hear the neurologist speaking to the patient first. So let's watch.
Jesmo li napokon riješili slučaj da je to područje samo nužno za prepoznavanje lica? Ne, nismo. Snimanje mozga nikada nam ne može reći da je neko područje nužno za bilo što. Sve što možemo utvrditi snimanjem mozga jest uključivanje i isključivanje pojednih područja dok ljudi mijenjaju tok misli. Kako bi utvrdili nužnost dijela mozga za pojedinu mentalnu funkciju, trebamo napraviti zbrku i vidjeti što će iz toga proizaći, dok inače to ne radimo. Ali nedavno se ukazala nevjerovatna prilika kada je nekoliko mojih kolega, testiralo čovjeka koji ima epilepsiju koji je ovdje prikazan u bolničkom krevetu s upravo stavljenim elektrodama na površinu mozga kako bi pronašli izvor njegovih napadaja. Tako se slučajno ispostavilo da su dvije od elektroda točno na vrhu područja za lica. Uz pacijentov pristanak liječnici su ga pitali što se dogodilo kada su mu električki stimulirali taj dio mozga. Pacijent ne zna gdje su te elektrode, nikada nije čuo za područje zaduženo za lice. Pogledajmo što će se dogoditi. Započet će kontrolom stanja sa "Stimulant" skoro nevidljivim crvenim dolje lijevo, dok struja još nije puštena, prvo ćete čuti neurologa kako se obraća pacijetu. Pogledajmo.
(Video) Neurologist: Okay, just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this. All right?
(Video) Neurolog: OK, samo gledajte u moje lice i recite mi što se događa kad napravim ovo. U redu?
Patient: Okay.
Pacijent: U redu
Neurologist: One, two, three.
Neurolog: Jedan, dva, tri.
Patient: Nothing. Neurologist: Nothing? Okay. I'm going to do it one more time. Look at my face. One, two, three.
Pacijent: Ništa Neurolog: Ništa? U redu. Ponovit ću još jednom. Pogledajte u moje lice. Jedan, dva, tri.
Patient: You just turned into somebody else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy, it went to the left. You almost looked like somebody I'd seen before, but somebody different. That was a trip. (Laughter)
Pacijent: Upravo ste se pretvorili u nekog drugog. Lice vam se preobrazilo. Nos vam se spljoštio, išao je nalijevo. Skoro ste izgledali kao netko koga sam sreo ranije. Ali netko drugačiji. To je bila halucinacija. (Smijeh)
Nancy Kanwisher: So this experiment — (Applause) — this experiment finally nails the case that this region of the brain is not only selectively responsive to faces but causally involved in face perception. So I went through all of these details about the face region to show you what it takes to really establish that a part of the brain is selectively involved in a specific mental process. Next, I'll go through much more quickly some of the other specialized regions of the brain that we and others have found. So to do this, I've spent a lot of time in the scanner over the last month so I can show you these things in my brain.
Nancy Kanwisher: Dakle to je bio eksperiment— (Pljesak) — Ovaj eksperiment napokon potvrđuje da ovo područje mozga ne samo da selektivno reagira na lica, već ponekad uključuje i percepciju lica. Prošla sam kroz sve ove detalje kako bih vam pokazala što je potrebno da stvarno ustanovimo selektivnost tog dijela mozga u pojedinom mentalnom procesu. U nastavku ću brzo proći kroz neke druge specijalizirane dijelove mozga koje smo mi i drugi otkrili. Kako bih to učinila, provela sam dosta vremena u skeneru posljednjeg mjeseca da vam pokažem te strukture u svom mozgu.
So let's get started. Here's my right hemisphere. So we're oriented like that. You're looking at my head this way. Imagine taking the skull off and looking at the surface of the brain like that. Okay, now as you can see, the surface of the brain is all folded up. So that's not good. Stuff could be hidden in there. We want to see the whole thing, so let's inflate it so we can see the whole thing. Next, let's find that face area I've been talking about that responds to images like these. To see that, let's turn the brain around and look on the inside surface on the bottom, and there it is, that's my face area. Just to the right of that is another region that is shown in purple that responds when you process color information, and near those regions are other regions that are involved in perceiving places, like right now, I'm seeing this layout of space around me and these regions in green right there are really active. There's another one out on the outside surface again where there's a couple more face regions as well. Also in this vicinity is a region that's selectively involved in processing visual motion, like these moving dots here, and that's in yellow at the bottom of the brain, and near that is a region that responds when you look at images of bodies and body parts like these, and that region is shown in lime green at the bottom of the brain.
Počnimo. Ovo je moja desna hemisfera. Orijentiramo se ovako. Na taj način gledate moju glavu. Zamislite uklonjenu lubanju i takav pogled na površinu mozga. U redu, kao što vidite površina mozga je sva presavijana. To nije dobro. Svašta bi se tu moglo kriti. Želimo vidjeti sve, podignimo to kako bismo mogli vidjeti sve. Pronađimo područje za lice o kojem sam vam govorila reagira na slike kao što je ova. Kako bismo to vidjeli, okrenimo mozak i pogledajmo unutrašnju površinu na dnu, evo ga, to je moje područje za lica. Desno od toga je drugo područje prikazano ljubičasto koje reagira kada obrađujete informacije o boji, blizu tog područja su druga područja koja su uključena pri percipiranju mjesta, kao sada, vidim ovaj raspored prostora oko mene i ova područja u zelenom, ovdje su zaista aktivna. Postoji još jedno na vanjskoj površini gdje je još nekoliko područja za lica. Također u ovoj blizini je područje koje je selektivno uključeno u procesiranju vizualnog pokreta kao kod ovih pokretnih točaka ovdje, to je označeno žutim na dnu mozga, a blizu toga je područje koje reagira kada gledate u slike tijela i dijelova tijela kao ove, to je područje prikazano žutozelenom na dnu mozga.
Now all these regions I've shown you so far are involved in specific aspects of visual perception. Do we also have specialized brain regions for other senses, like hearing? Yes, we do. So if we turn the brain around a little bit, here's a region in dark blue that we reported just a couple of months ago, and this region responds strongly when you hear sounds with pitch, like these. (Sirens) (Cello music) (Doorbell) In contrast, that same region does not respond strongly when you hear perfectly familiar sounds that don't have a clear pitch, like these. (Chomping) (Drum roll) (Toilet flushing)
Sva ova područja koja sam vam do sada pokazala su uključena u pojedine aspekte vizualnog opažanja. Imamo li također specijalizirana područja u mozgu Za druga čula, kao sluh? Da, imamo. Ako okrenemo mozak, Ovo tamno plavo područje o kojem smo izvještavali, prije nekoliko mjeseci ovo područje snažno reagira kada čujete zvukove visokih tonova, poput ovih (Sirene) (Zvuk violončela) (Zvono) No ta ista područja ne reagiraju snažno kada čujete poznate zvukove koji nemaju jasne tonove, kao ove (Žvakanje) (Bubnjanje) (Puštanje vode na wc-u)
Okay. Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech.
U redu. Pokraj područja za visoke tonove je drugi skup područja koji selektivno reagiraju kada čujete zvuk govora.
Okay, now let's look at these same regions. In my left hemisphere, there's a similar arrangement — not identical, but similar — and most of the same regions are in here, albeit sometimes different in size.
U redu, pogledajmo sada ta ista područja. U mojoj lijevoj hemisferi je sličan raspored— ne identičan, već sličan— i većina istih područja su ovdje, ponekad ipak različite veličine.
Now, everything I've shown you so far are regions that are involved in different aspects of perception, vision and hearing. Do we also have specialized brain regions for really fancy, complicated mental processes? Yes, we do. So here in pink are my language regions. So it's been known for a very long time that that general vicinity of the brain is involved in processing language, but we showed very recently that these pink regions respond extremely selectively. They respond when you understand the meaning of a sentence, but not when you do other complex mental things, like mental arithmetic or holding information in memory or appreciating the complex structure in a piece of music.
Sve što sam vam do sada pokazala su područja uključena u različite aspekte percepcije vida i sluha. Imamo li specijalizirane regije u mozgu Za zahtjevne, složene mentalne aktivnosti? Imamo. Ovdje ružičasto su moja područja za jezik. Dugo vremena je poznato da je područje mozga uključeno u obradi jezika, no mi smo nedavno pokazali da ova ružičasta područja reagiraju izrazito selektivno. Reagiraju kada razumijete značenje rečenice, ali ne i pri drugim, složenijim mentalnim procesima, naprimjer računanju, pamćenju informacija ili uživanju u kompleksnoj strukturi glazbenog komada.
The most amazing region that's been found yet is this one right here in turquoise. This region responds when you think about what another person is thinking. So that may seem crazy, but actually, we humans do this all the time. You're doing this when you realize that your partner is going to be worried if you don't call home to say you're running late. I'm doing this with that region of my brain right now when I realize that you guys are probably now wondering about all that gray, uncharted territory in the brain, and what's up with that?
Najnevjerojatnije područje koje je pronađeno do sada je ovo ovdje, tirkizno. Ovo područje reagira dok razmišljate o čemu druga osoba razmišlja. Iako se čini ludo, zapravo mi ljudi činimo to svakodnevno. To radimo kada shvatimo da će naš partner bit zabrinut ako se ne javimo da kasnimo. Činim to upravo sada kada shvaćam da se vi vjerojatno upravo pitate što sa svim tim sivim, neoznačenim područjima mozga, što s njima?
Well, I'm wondering about that too, and we're running a bunch of experiments in my lab right now to try to find a number of other possible specializations in the brain for other very specific mental functions. But importantly, I don't think we have specializations in the brain for every important mental function, even mental functions that may be critical for survival. In fact, a few years ago, there was a scientist in my lab who became quite convinced that he'd found a brain region for detecting food, and it responded really strongly in the scanner when people looked at images like this. And further, he found a similar response in more or less the same location in 10 out of 12 subjects. So he was pretty stoked, and he was running around the lab telling everyone that he was going to go on "Oprah" with his big discovery. But then he devised the critical test: He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape, but that weren't food, like these. And his region responded the same to both sets of images. So it wasn't a food area, it was just a region that liked colors and shapes. So much for "Oprah."
Zapravo i mene to zanima, Provodimo niz eksperimenata u mojem laboratoriju pokušavamo pronaći niz drugih mogućih specijalizacija u mozgu za druge specifične mentalne funkcije. No ono što je važnije, ne smatram da imamo specijalizirana područja mozga za svaku važniju mentalnu funkciju, čak ni za one mentalne funkcije važne za opstanak. Naprotiv, prije par godina, u mojem labu bio je znanstvenik koji je bio prilično uvjeren da je pronašao područje u mozgu za otkrivanje hrane, reagiralo je veoma snažno na skeneru kada bi ljudi gledali slike kao što je ova. Nadalje, pronšao je sličan odgovor na manje više istoj lokaciji kod 10 od 12 ispitanika. bio je prilično uživljen, trčao je po laboratoriju govoreći svima da će ići na Oprah show sa ovim velikim otkrićem. No tada je sastavio kritičan test: pokazao je ispitanicima slike hrane kao što su ove i usporedio ih sa slikama sličnih boja i oblika, ali to nije bila hrana, kao ove. To područje reagiralo je jednako u oba slučaja. Dakle to nije bilo područje za hranu, već samo područje za boju i oblik općenito. Toliko o Oprah show-u.
But then the question, of course, is, how do we process all this other stuff that we don't have specialized brain regions for? Well, I think the answer is that in addition to these highly specialized components that I've been describing, we also have a lot of very general- purpose machinery in our heads that enables us to tackle whatever problem comes along. In fact, we've shown recently that these regions here in white respond whenever you do any difficult mental task at all — well, of the seven that we've tested. So each of the brain regions that I've described to you today is present in approximately the same location in every normal subject. I could take any of you, pop you in the scanner, and find each of those regions in your brain, and it would look a lot like my brain, although the regions would be slightly different in their exact location and in their size.
No postavlja se pitanje kako obrađujemo sve ono za što nemamo specijalizirana područja u mozgu? Mislim da je odgovor, pored ovih visoko specijaliziranih komponenti koje sam opisivala, također u velikim područjima opće namjene,koje posjedujemo A omogućuju sam da riješavamo problem koji naiđe. Zapravo, nedavno smo pokazali da ova područja u bijelom reagiraju kada vršimo neki teži mentalni zadatak i uopće — barem kod sedam koje smo testirali. Svaka od regija u mozgu koje sam vam opisala danas je prisutna na otprilike istoj lokaciji kod svakog normalnog ispitanika. Mogu uzeti bilo koga od vas, ubaciti vas u skener, i pronaći svaku od tih regija vašem mozgu, izgledalo bi kao moj mozak, iako ponešto drugačiji u njihovoj lokaciji i veličini.
What's important to me about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions, but the simple fact that we have selective, specific components of mind and brain in the first place. I mean, it could have been otherwise. The brain could have been a single, general-purpose processor, more like a kitchen knife than a Swiss Army knife. Instead, what brain imaging has delivered is this rich and interesting picture of the human mind. So we have this picture of very general-purpose machinery in our heads in addition to this surprising array of very specialized components.
Ono što je za mene važno u ovom radu nije sama lokacija tih područja u mozgu, već na prvom mjestu, sama činjenica da posjedujemo selektivne, specifične komponente uma i mozga. Moglo je biti i obrnuto. Mozak je mogao biti jednoznačni, procesor opće namjene, više kao običan kuhinjski nož nego švicarski vojni nož. Snimanje mozga nam je omogućilo pogled na ovu bogatu i zanimljivu sliku ljudskog uma. Imamo slike veoma općenite namjene mašinerije u našim glavama uz ovaj iznenađujući niz visoko specijaliziranih komponenti.
It's early days in this enterprise. We've painted only the first brushstrokes in our neural portrait of the human mind. The most fundamental questions remain unanswered. So for example, what does each of these regions do exactly? Why do we need three face areas and three place areas, and what's the division of labor between them? Second, how are all these things connected in the brain? With diffusion imaging, you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain, and with this method shown here, you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain, potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain. Third, how does all of this very systematic structure get built, both over development in childhood and over the evolution of our species? To address questions like that, scientists are now scanning other species of animals, and they're also scanning human infants.
To su tek počeci. Oslikali smo tek prve poteze neurološkog portreta ljudskog uma. Najfundamentalnija pitanja ostaju neodgovorena. Naprimjer, što svako od tih područja točno radi Zašto trebamo tri područja za lice, tri područja za mjesta, kakva je podjela rada među njima? Nadalje kako su povezani u mozgu? Difuznim snimanjem, Možete pratiti snop neurona koji povezuju različite strane mozga, a ovom metodom pokazanom ovdje, možete pratiti pojedinačnu povezanost neurona u mozgu, s mogućnošću da jednog dana dobijemo umreženi dijagram čitavog ljudskog mozga. Nadalje, kako se ove veoma sistematske strukture izgrađuju, tijekom razvoja u djetinjstvu kao i tijekom čitave evulucije naše vrste? Kako bi odgovorili na sva ova pitanja, znanstvenici sada skeniraju različite životinjske vrste, kao i sama ljudska novorođenča.
Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and autism. That's a hugely important goal, and I'd be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it, but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that's worth doing. The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease. What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience, to understand, in essence, who we are? This is, I think, the greatest scientific quest of all time.
Mnogi opravdavaju visoku cijenu neuroloških istraživanja naglašavajući da bi nam jednog dana mogla pomoći pri liječenju poremećaja kao što je Alzheimerova bolest ili autizam. Što je veoma važan cilj, i bila bi oduševljena kada bi moj rad pridonio tome, popravljanje pokvarenih stvari u svijetu nije jedina stvar vrijedna bavljenja. Napor da se razumije ljudski um i mozak je vrijedan čak i ako ne pridonesi izliječenju iti jedne bolesti. Što bi moglo biti uzbudljivije od razumijevanja osnovnog mehanizma na kojima se zasniva ljudsko iskustvo, da razumijemo, u biti, tko smo zapravo? To je, po mome mišljenu, najzahtijevniji zadatak znanosti svih vremena.
(Applause)
(Pljesak)