Ar

Engineering the mind for one night

On Thursday, October 28, Ar celebrated its first community event at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, entitled “Engineering the Mind”. Scientists, high-school and college students, doctors and Portuguese citizens of all ages gathered to get a close up view of the science done in Portugal and around the world, and to reflect on how it affects our lives and beliefs. In the spotlight, the tools humans use to modify their own brains - from drugs to electricity and light.

Technology changes our daily lives. Knowledge challenges our beliefs. Technology opens avenues for knowledge, and the quest for knowledge presses for new technologies. The interplay between technology and cognition is portrayed by Stanley Kubrick in his classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey - primates once learned to use a bone as an instrument of their will, and never again the world looked the same. The process portrayed in this allegory kept unrolling throughout history - the press, the steam engine, antibiotics and the personal computer were important milestones - and brought us to an unexpected, mind-twisting situation: not only does man engineer his surroundings. Man can engineer the substrate of its own cognition: the brain.

With this reasoning, the session was opened by the PhD student Thiago Gouvêa. After briefly acknowledging the brain as a large network of interconnected, communicating hubs called neurons, we turned our attention to the history of psychiatry. Joaquim Alves da Silva, psychiatrist and neuroscience student, led us on the journey. Trepanations (a gross type of skull surgery) in ancient Egypt were a precocious attempt to target the material cause of the diseases of the soul - and surprisingly they weren’t so far from the truth. Perhaps the procedure emerged by trial and error, but soon led to some sort of conceptualization. In old Greek-Roman culture for example, an  elaborate theory based on the function of body humors tried to make sense of the chaos of human biology and inform treatments. These theories might look mystical in retrospect, but as Joaquim pointed out 21st century psychiatry is still full of observations for which we have no good theories, and many of the drug therapies in use today were born out of serendipity rather than knowledge-based predictions. But he believes psychiatry tends to get more efficient as research focuses on understanding the basic principles of brain function. “By unveiling the nuts and bolts of the biology of behavior, basic neuroscience is already supplying psychiatrists with a more informed way to think about how the brain breaks down”, he says in his interview to Ar.

Joaquim’s talk made us aware of the limitations of modern pharmacology, and left us curious about another type of therapy: can we get better results by stimulating the brain electrically? To answer this question, Albino Oliveira-Maia, also a psychiatrist and a research fellow at Champalimaud, presented deep brain stimulation (DBS) as a possible treatment for disorders that are resistant to pharmacological treatment, such as Parkinson’s disease and bipolar disorder. Albino described in detail the technology used to administer DBS, and included touching photographs and videos of people undergoing treatment and how it changed their lives.

Ed Boyden, leader of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT and the featured speaker for this event, already had a captive and enthusiastic audience when he began describing his lab’s recent work. He gave a brief synopsis of several new technologies that his group has developed, focusing on  optogenetics and the discovery of new molecules that respond to light, and ways scientists can use them to control neurons. He showed several short clips of light-activated neurons, and concluded his talk by showing that this work has potential for possible treatments for blindness and psychiatric diseases.

A round table discussion followed the conclusion of Ed’s presentation, and the audience had a chance to question (in English or in Portuguese) the speakers about their work and research, pose their own doubts about these and other approaches to the study of the brain and psychiatric diseases in particular, and speculate about where such progress is leading us.

Speakers, Champalimaud students and audience members flowed out into the hall where an open bar and music created an atmosphere that encouraged continued interaction and discussion between the community and the scientists. A discussion that will keep unrolling, we hope.

Videos

Gallery

Pictures taken by Gustavo Mello and Dennis Herrmann