The language of neuroscience

Saturday 15 January 2022

I am re-watching the lectures from last term as I prepare for an exam next week which is worth 10% of my Masters degree in neuroscience. Here is a typical piece of narrative, from a lecture about how the brain learns:

“The NDMA subclass of ionotropic glutamate receptors has long been known to serve as a coincidence detector that determines when both pre-synaptic neurons and post-synaptic neurons are active around the same time thereby meeting the conditions under which Hebbian synaptic potentiation should occur, and it does this because it is both ligand gated, which means that glutamate binds to it in order to open the ion channel, that allows positively charged calcium ions to flow from outside the neuron to inside the neuron; but it is also voltage dependent, which means that the post-synaptic membrane has to be depolarized, i.e. the post-synaptic cell has to be active for this ion channel to open…..” 

The crazy thing is that I actually understand what this means. Even my ageing, disease ridden brain, is a remarkable learning engine, evidently still able to acquire a whole new language, and put it to use.

In my student essays I now use fancy words like aetiopathogenesis, magnetoencephalography, xenotransplantation, and single nucleotide polymorphism, and occasionally I possibly even use them in the right context.

At first sight this new language looks impenetrable but it does make sense. For example, there are a lot of compound words, like in German.  So if you take “patho” which means disease, you can combine it with “histo”, which means tissue, to create ”histopathology” which means the study of the effect of diseases on tissue. If you take “aetio”, “patho” and “genesis” you get “aetiopathogenesis” which means the cause and development of a disease. Biology and medicine are complicated, so they tend to need a lot of fancy terms. The human brain is particularly complicated, so neuroscience adds a lot more words to the lexicon. 

Neuroscience is also fascinating. Indeed, I find myself getting distracted from my goal of getting into neurodegeneration research because there are so many other interesting things going on: awesome technology like fMRI and PET for neuroimaging; the incredible process of brain development from single cell to 86 billion neurons and an astonishing 100 trillion connections between them; many as yet unsolved mysteries like memory formation, sleep, placebos, visual perception, psychoses and biggest of all, how does consciousness arise?

I’ll be sure to write more about this stuff another time, but for now, I’d better get back to learning and memory, the connectome and in vivo cell reprogramming… 

Bah humbug

Thursday 16 December 2021

I don’t really like Christmas any more.

Writing cards, going shopping, wrapping presents, decorating the tree… all of them are, frankly, a pain in the neck, or, more literally, a pain in the hands. Everyday activities like getting dressed or grocery shopping are getting harder as it is without this burden of extra tasks requiring fine motor control.

I went to see my mother yesterday for a pre-Christmas gift-and-card-swapping visit and it was almost comical: mother and son, both with Parkinson’s, sitting on the floor trying to wrap a present for one of my brothers. We both fumbled for ages finding the end of the Sellotape, but eventually got a sort of system going. With trembling hands, she slowly folded the paper whilst I managed to stick the tape onto everything except the paper, and then eventually onto the paper itself. The end result wasn’t too bad but I have the distinct opinion that next year I need to be smarter: e-cards, or gift-wrapping services, or printed address labels or something. After all, it will only be harder in twelve months’ time.

We went for a short “walk” (shuffle might be a better word) near the house and played two games of scrabble and of course I gave her a back massage. It still amazes me how someone so thin and frail can have back muscles as hard as plywood. We even had a Parky power nap together – lying comatose side-by-side on the double bed in the spare room for ten minutes.

Despite our shared challenges, it was joyous to spend a few hours with her. As I departed into the cold darkness, I resolved to make the 7-8 hour round trip more often. She is lonely and craves human interaction, but she is also very much settled in her home and not keen to move, so I, and my siblings, need to travel to her.

When I returned home I looked at the pile of cards waiting to be written. It's sorely tempting to simply not bother.

Bah humbug. Yep, I no longer like Christmas.

Neuroscience week 1

Saturday 2 October 2021

The first week of the MSc course in neuroscience I am doing at King’s College London was quite a shock. I had been expecting a gentle introduction: some basics like “what is neuroscience” to lay a foundation, some admin, some meetings with tutors and the like.

There were a couple of introductory lectures on topics like brain anatomy and neuropathology but the rest of it was straight in at the deep end. Advanced topics like the pharmacology of glutamate and excitotoxicity, the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing method, and the physiology of microglia and oligodendrocytes. Below are some of the trickier slides presented to give you an idea.

 

It seems there is rather more assumed knowledge than I had bargained for and I have my work cut out to fill in the gaps. As for “what is neuroscience?”, that was our first essay, 500 words due in by midday on the first Friday. I’ve pasted my attempt below in case you’re interested.

It's also not been straightforward with the Parkinson’s, the main problem being the fatigue. I briefly fell asleep in one lecture, much to the speaker’s annoyance.

I was feeling concerned but then I also had some good extra-curricular conversations this week with people like the professor leading neurodegeneration research at Cambridge University and a leading researcher at Plymouth University. These conversations are are starting to give me ideas about a possible MSc project, and a research direction once I finish the degree. My thinking is not to try and become a neuroscientist, but rather to take a research problem where I can use my technology and data science skills and practical experience to make a difference. And one thing I learnt in the corporate world is that you can achieve so much more with a network of people than working solo.

So, despite feeling sometimes like my head was going to explode, and at other times like I was going to black out, I’m positive about the rest of the course.

Things get more interesting next week as we get to visit the “brain bank”, a room full of freezers storing samples from both healthy and diseased brains at -80 degrees. It’s certainly going to be a memorable year.

 

 

What is neuroscience?

 

neuroscience n. any or all of the scientific disciplines studying the nervous system and/or the mind and mental behaviour  (Landau, 1990)

This dictionary definition of neuroscience sounds simple but actually contains a number of elements that we need to unpick.

Firstly, neuroscience is a scientific discipline, meaning that it is a continuously evolving body of knowledge and practice which is underpinned by the scientific method. This requires that hypotheses are objectively assessed against real world observations and adopted, refined or discarded accordingly.

Secondly, it relates to the nervous system. In humans, this means the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system) plus other nerve cells in the rest of the body (the peripheral nervous system) as summarised in Figure 1. Whilst most of the focus of neuroscience research is related to humans, it is worth noting that neuroscience can relate to any living organism with a nervous system, and this includes a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate animals.

Thirdly, neuroscience encompasses not just the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system but also the more nebulous concepts of the mind and mental behaviour, including thorny topics like consciousness and intelligence.

Finally, neuroscience incorporates a number of sub-disciplines. The main clinical ones are shown in Table 1 (Bear, 2016).

Table 1 Clinical disciplines in neuroscience

Clinical discipline	Description
Neurology	Diagnosis and treatment of nervous system diseases
Psychiatry	Diagnosis and treatment of behavioural disorders
Neurosurgery	Surgery on the brain and spinal cord
Neuropathology	Understanding changes in the nervous system caused by disease

 

Figure 1. Elements of the human nervous system

In addition, there are many experimental specialisms from neuropharmacology to developmental neurobiology.

The term “neuroscience” is relatively new, though of course the brain and nervous system have been studied since antiquity.  For instance, according to Bear (2016), the Society for Neuroscience, a large association for professional neuroscientists was founded only in 1970.

A statement often made is that the human brain is the most complex object we have yet to encounter and, although neuroscience has made great progress in recent years at starting to understand its function at a molecular and cellular level, at a system level several fundamental questions have yet to be answered, including:

·         How does the brain give rise to consciousness?

·         What role does language play in human intelligence?

·         Why do animals with a nervous system need to sleep?

·         What causes certain disorders of the brain such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s Disease, and how can we prevent or cure them?

Neuroscience therefore is not only a fascinating subject, but also one that has the potential to make a large impact on humanity.

 

Bibliography

Landau, S. et al (editors) (1990). Chambers English Dictionary, 7^th edition. Edinburgh: W & R Chambers Ltd.

Bear, M., Connors, B., & Paradiso, M. (2016). Neuroscience: exploring the brain, 4^th edition, chapter 1. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer.