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,
今天我想分享 全球科學家正在進行的一項計畫, 它的目的是要 畫出人類大腦的神經圖像。 這項工作的核心概念是, 人類的心智和大腦, 並非單一、通用的處理器, 而是許多高度分工單元的集合體, 各自負責不同的特定問題, 同時也聯合造就了 我們之為人類和思考者。 為了讓大家感受一下我的意思,
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.
請想像這個情景: 你走進你孩子的托兒所, 像往常一樣,你看到十幾個孩子 正在等著家長來接。 但是這次, 這些孩子的臉孔看起來出奇地相似, 你認不出哪個是你的孩子, 是你該換一副新眼鏡了嗎? 還是你神經錯亂了? 你心裡快速自我檢查了一下, 還好啊,你思緒清晰, 視力也沒問題, 一切看起來都很正常, 除了孩子們的臉孔。 你可以看到他們的臉, 但是它們看起來沒有明顯的差別, 而且全都很陌生。 後來是因為你看到一條橘色髮帶, 才找到你的女兒。
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.
這種突然失去臉孔辨識能力的情況, 真的發生在某些人身上, 叫做「面容失憶症」, 是因為大腦特定部位損傷所致。 神奇的是, 除了臉孔辨識能力受損以外, 其他一切正常。
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.
面容失憶症只是 許多奇特的精神疾病之一, 都是大腦損傷後 可能產生的後遺症。 長久以來,這些病症一直都在暗示我們, 大腦可以分成許多特殊的單元。 我們對這些大腦單元的研究, 近來進展神速, 這要歸功於大腦造影技術的發明, 特別是 MRI 核磁共振造影。 磁振造影能看到 高解析度的腦部結構, 我馬上要給你們看 某日常物品的一組 MRI 橫截面圖。 我會快速掃過一遍, 看你們能不能認出這是什麼東西。 開始:
It's not that easy. It's an artichoke.
不容易認出來,是一朵朝鮮薊。
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.
好,我們再試另一組, 從底部掃到頂部。 觀眾:青花菜! 講者:一顆青花菜! 這不是很美嗎?我超愛這個。
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.
好,再一個。 是大腦,很明顯。 事實上,這是我的大腦。 正在掃過我的頭,產生一連串縱剖面圖, 右邊是我的鼻子, 現在掃到這裡。
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.
這些照片很漂亮,如果容我這麼說, 但這只能看到解剖圖。 功能性造影 fMRI 最偉大的進步是 科學家不再只能看到大腦的「構造」, 而能看到「活動」, 也就是神經元活動的地方。 原理是這樣: 腦很像肌肉, 活躍時, 需要充血,以供活動所需。 幸好,大腦血流量控制是區域性的, 所以,若這裡有一束神經元活躍起來, 並且開始發射, 就只有這裡的血流量會增加。 所以功能性造影 fMRI 會測到這裡的血流量增加, 在神經元活躍處, 產生較強的核磁共振反應。
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)
為了讓大家實際看一下, 功能性造影實驗怎麼進行, 並且了解它的功用和限制, 讓我介紹我早期的一項研究: 我們想知道, 大腦中是否有辨識臉孔的專區。 當時已有理由支持這個假設, 因為有剛才講的「面容失憶症」病例。 但是從未有人在正常的大腦裡 找到過這個區域, 所以我們開始尋找它。 我是第一個受試者。 我進入掃描機,仰躺著, 頭盡量保持不動, 一邊盯著像這些人臉的照片, 以及像這些物品的圖片。 再看人臉,再看物品,連續好幾小時。 我待在核磁共振儀裡的時間, 久到快破世界紀錄, 所以我可以告訴大家, 做 MRI 研究要具備的一項重要技能, 就是憋尿。 (觀眾笑聲) 走出掃描儀以後,
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.
我快速分析了一下數據, 看看我的大腦有沒有什麼區域 會在我看到人臉時,產生更強的反應, 強於看到普通物品時。 這是我所看到的: 依今天的標準來看,這個影像粗糙不堪, 但當時我認為它很美。 它展示了那個區域, 就是那一個小小的亮點, 大概像一顆橄欖的大小, 位在我大腦的底部表層, 大約在從這進去一吋深的地方。 我大腦這部分所做的, 就是產生較強的核磁共振反應, 也就是,較活躍的神經元活動, 這發生在當我看著人臉時, 而不是看著物品時。 這非常有趣。 但我們怎知這不是巧合? 最簡單的方法, 就是再做一次實驗。 所以我又躺回掃描儀中, 看了更多的臉孔,以及更多的物品, 結果得到幾乎同一處亮點。 然後我又重複一遍這個實驗, 再一遍, 又一遍, 再一遍。 做完這一遍, 我決定相信,實驗結果是正確的。 但是,這可能是因為我的大腦比較怪, 別人的大腦不會這樣。 為了找到答案,我們又掃描了一批人, 結果發現幾乎每個人 都有那一小塊臉孔辨識區域, 大約都在大腦中相似的地帶。
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.
所以接下來的問題是, 這個區域到底是做什麼的? 它真的只專門辨識臉孔嗎? 不見得,對吧? 可能它不只對臉孔有反應, 而是對身體任何部分都有反應。 可能它對任何人類的、 或是有生命的、 或是圓形的東西都有反應。 唯一的確認方法, 證實它專門辨識人臉, 就是一一排除這些可能性。 所以接下來兩、三年, 我們幾乎都在掃描受試者, 讓他們看各式各樣不同的圖片。 結果發現,這個大腦區域 只要看到是臉孔的圖像,反應都很強烈。 但是看到非臉圖像時,反應不強, 就像下排這些。 那麼,我們是否解開了謎底?
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.
確認我們需要靠它來辨識臉孔? 不,還不能確定。 大腦造影技術沒辦法告訴我們 某個大腦區域對於某種功能 是否為必要。 大腦造影只能 觀察人們有不同想法時, 大腦各區的亮、暗情況。 若想知道大腦某區域 是否為某種心智功能之必要, 必須刺激這個區域,看看會發生什麼事。 通常我們沒有機會這樣做。 但是後來有一個奇妙的機緣: 最近我的幾位同事 測試了這位癲癇病患, 這是他躺在病床上, 醫院剛安裝了一些電極 在他的大腦表面, 以便找出癲癇的病灶。 很巧的是, 其中兩個電極 剛好裝在臉孔辨識區上面。 在病人的同意之下, 醫生通電流刺激大腦這個區域, 然後問他有什麼感覺。 當時這位病人並不知道 這些電極裝在哪裡, 也從未聽說過大腦有臉孔辨識區。 讓我們看看發生了什麼事: 先從控制組開始, 螢幕左下角會有淡紅色標示 “SHAM”, 表示這時沒有電流通過。 你會先聽到神經學家對病人說話。 我們開始看:
(Video) Neurologist: Okay, just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this. All right?
神經學家:好,看著我的臉, 然後告訴我, 當我這樣做的時候發生了什麼事。 可以嗎?
Patient: Okay.
病人:好。
Neurologist: One, two, three.
神經學家:一、二、三。 (SHAM,未通電流)
Patient: Nothing. Neurologist: Nothing? Okay. I'm going to do it one more time. Look at my face. One, two, three.
病人:沒事。 神經學家:沒事?好。 我要再做一次, 看著我的臉, 一、二、三。 (通 4 毫安培電流)
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)
病人:你剛剛變成了另外一個人! 你變臉了, 你的鼻子下垂,往左偏了, 你看起來幾乎很像 我以前見過的某個人, 但又不是那個人。 太迷幻了! (笑聲)
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.
所以這個實驗 (觀眾掌聲) 這個實驗終於確認 大腦的這個區域 不只會對臉孔產生反應, 而是直接影響臉孔認知。 我解釋臉孔辨識區的這所有細節, 是要讓你們了解, 要怎樣才能確知大腦某個區域 是專門負責某項腦力活動。 接下來,我會很快地介紹, 我們和其他科學家發現的 大腦其他功能專區。 為了這個,上個月我常待在掃描儀內, 好讓你們看看我大腦的這些區域。 讓我們開始吧:
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.
這是我的右腦。 掃描是從這個方向, 你們是這樣看我的大腦。 想像把頭殼拿掉, 然後從這裡看大腦表面。 好,正如你們所見, 大腦表面滿是褶皺, 這樣不容易看,裡面可能還有東西, 我們想要看到大腦的全部, 所以把它展開,就可以看清楚了。 接下來,要找出剛講的臉孔辨識區, 就是對這些圖有反應的那個區域。 要看到它,就把大腦轉過來, 看底部的內表層。 找到了,這就是我的臉孔辨識區。 它的右邊,是另一個區域, 標成紫色的, 會對色彩有反應。 另外,在這兩區附近, 有些區域是跟地理認知有關。 像現在,我正在看四週的講堂空間, 這些綠色的區域 會非常活躍, 外表層也有一個綠色的。 還有幾個臉孔辨識區。 另外,這附近還有 一個處理視覺運動的區域, 就像這些運動的小點, 就是在大腦底部黃色的這個區域。 旁邊的這個區域, 會在看到身體部位時產生反應, 像這些圖片, 就是在大腦底部亮綠色的那個區域。
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)
到目前為止,我給你們看的所有區域, 都是跟視覺的特定面向有關。 那麼,我們是否有大腦專區 負責其他感覺呢? 例如聽覺? 有的。 如果把大腦再轉過來一點, 這裡有一塊深藍色區域, 是我們在幾個月前才確認的, 聽到有音高的聲音時,這區會強烈反應, 像這些聲音: (警報聲) (大提琴音樂) (門鈴) 但是,同樣這個區域, 聽到無明顯音高的熟悉聲音時, 卻反應微弱, 像這些聲音: (拍手聲) (鼓點聲) (馬桶沖水聲)
Okay. Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech.
好,音高區的旁邊, 有另一組區域, 會對講話聲有反應。
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.
好,我們來看看同樣這些區域, 在我的左腦,也有相似的區域分佈, 不完全相同,但是十分相似。 同樣的這些區域 幾乎也都在左腦裡, 只是大小可能不一樣。
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.
到現在為止,我介紹的所有區域, 都跟知覺的不同面向有關, 視覺跟聽覺。 那,大腦有沒有專區 負責很高階、複雜的心智活動呢? 有的。 這些粉紅色塊是我的語言區。 科學家很早就發現, 大腦的這些地帶 是語言處理區。 但我們的最新研究顯示, 這些粉紅區域的反應 是非常有選擇性。 當你了解一個句子的意思時,反應很強, 但是對其他複雜的腦力活動沒有反應, 例如,心算, 或記憶訊息, 或欣賞一段音樂的複雜結構。
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?
目前所發現最令人稱奇的區域, 是藍綠色的這一塊, 當你猜測他人心思時,這一區會很活躍。 聽起來很詭異, 但其實,我們人類經常做這件事, 比方說,當你想到 你的伴侶會很擔憂, 如果你會晚回家卻沒打電話。 現在我大腦的那一區也在這樣做, 就在我意識到 你們可能正在猜測 大腦中那些未知的灰色區域, 想知道它們是做什麼的? 其實,我自己也很想知道,
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."
我的實驗室團隊正在進行很多實驗, 想找到其他一些 可能存在的大腦專區, 負責其他特定心智功能。 但是我想強調, 不是每個重要的心智功能 都有對應的大腦專區, 即使是攸關生存的重要心智功能。 事實上,幾年前, 我實驗室有一位科學家, 他十分肯定 自己發現了辨識食物的大腦專區, 當人們看到這些圖像時,反應很強烈。 不但如此, 他在 12 位受試者中發現, 有 10 位都在相似區域有類似反應。 這發現讓他非常振奮, 在實驗室滿場跑, 告訴每個人他要上電視《毆普拉》受訪, 分享他的大發現了! 但接下來他設計了一個關鍵的測試: 給受試者看像這樣的食物圖片, 對照另一組顏色、形狀都很相似 但並非食物的圖片,就像這些, 結果這個大腦區域 對兩組圖片反應都一樣, 所以它並不是食物專區, 只是一個喜歡顏色和形狀的區域。 上《毆普拉》的美夢就泡湯了。
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.
那麼接下來的問題當然是, 人類是如何辦到 其他那些沒有大腦專區負責的事呢? 我認為答案是, 除了今天介紹的這些高度分工專區, 大腦裡還有許多通用的機制, 使我們能夠處理遇到的任何問題。 事實上,我們最新的研究顯示, 這些白色區域, 在你做任何困難任務時都有反應, 至少對我們設計的全部七個任務 都有反應。 我今天介紹的每一個大腦專區, 在每個正常大腦中,位置幾乎都一樣。 我可以隨意挑選你們其中一人, 送進掃描儀, 找出在你大腦中的這些專區, 結果會和我大腦的分佈很像, 儘管精確位置和大小可能稍有差異。 對我而言,這項工作的重要性,
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.
並不在於這些大腦專區的特定位置, 而是發現, 大腦和心智確實有非常專屬的單元。 意思是,當初可能有不一樣的發現, 人腦可能是個單一、通用的處理器, 像一把菜刀, 而不是一把瑞士刀。 然而,腦造影技術呈現了 豐富奧妙的人腦圖像。 所以我們看到整個大腦是 一部萬用機器, 加上令人驚奇的許多 高度分工的專用元件。
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.
腦神經科學還在萌芽階段, 人類大腦神經圖像 我們只畫了剛開始的幾筆, 最根本的一些問題仍無解答。 例如, 今天講的每個區域到底是做什麼的? 為什麼我們需要三個臉孔區域? 和三個地理區域? 它們之間如何分工? 第二,大腦中這所有的東西 如何互相聯繫? 利用擴散造影, 可以追蹤連接大腦不同部分的 多束神經元, 你現在看到的這個方法, 可以追蹤「個別神經元」之間的聯繫, 有朝一日,或許能畫出完整的人腦線路圖。 第三,這整個超高系統結構 是如何建立起來的? 童年時期的發展對它有什麼影響? 物種演化對它又有什麼影響? 為了解決像這類的問題, 科學家們已開始掃描其他動物, 也掃描人類嬰兒。
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.
許多人認為腦神經學 值得斥資重金研究, 認為將來可能會幫助我們 治療大腦疾病, 如老年癡呆症和自閉症。 這個目標極其重要, 若我的研究能有助此目標, 我會高興得不得了。 但修復世間的破碎與敗壞, 不是唯一值得做的事。 認識人類心智和大腦 同樣值得追求, 即使這些努力沒能治癒任何疾病。 有什麼比了解人類生命經驗的基礎 更令人振奮呢? 從本質上,了解「我們是誰?」 我想, 這是人類永遠最重要的科學探索。
(Applause)
投影片:感謝研究團隊過去與現在成員 (觀眾掌聲)