If you could solve any problem about brains, what would it be?

dementia (Alzheimer’s type)

I would find a way to solve moronism and ignorance. Is there something we can do to the brains of people like Palin to help the world move forward?

Degradation would be of the top concern for me. If intelligence did not decline at old age I believe life would be vastly improved for everyone.

Intelligence declining at old age is largely a problem with how we treat old people. In experiments, treating a 21 year old the way we treat the elderly in America makes them start to act like the elderly here. Whereas in cultures where they place great value on elders and the minds of elders, they often maintain great intelligence to the end.

Of course, this is not true for things like Alzheimers, but there is a very psychological response to how we treat our elderly.

i want an pill that gives me an orgasm. pronto tonto.

Alzheimers.

Well, that or helping to simulate or rebuild the corpus callosum in split brain patients.

mjoyce: There was an antidepressant that didn’t make it to market. One of the major side-effects was that when some of the trial users sneezed, they orgasmed.

Selfishly I’d want you to develop some pill that made it so I’d remember things better. But researchers should probably work on helping those in need, so as the next best thing I’m going to go ahead and third Alzheimers.

Depression. It saps all the joy out of too many lives, victims and those close to them alike.

@niki – Haha, still procrastinating? Tsk tsk.

Wait. That’s what I’m doing, too. Damn.

i am torn between using this ability to cure depression and using it to cure alzheimer’s/dementia. alzheimer’s takes too many people before their time, and how terrible would it be to have a body that works but to actually forget how to eat, forget how to go to the bathroom, forget how to talk?

and as for depression, i never experienced it myself (clinical depression) but it does take lives, ruin lives, and causes suffering by the families and loved ones, plus can be a factor in addiction and substance abuse.

ironically, both of these (dementia and depression) can cause someone to end up in a chair all day staring at the wall, doing nothing, or to end up dead.

@ judochop Why governer Palin?

I would choose mind concentration. I have trouble concentrating every now and then and i am suspecting that I am having ADD. And also after reading the above comments I also wish to help people that have Alzheimers.

I would find out as much as possible about the mind/body connection, i.e., how your mental state affects your physical well-being. Can you really manifest things in your body merely by focusing on them and stressing out about them? Can you help promote good health by keeping a healthy attitude?

The cure for Parkinson’s Disease.

Someway to have better connections between the two hemispheres of the brain. I hear women have better connections when it comes to
this. If we could better connect our logical brains with the more artistic/wholistic side of the brain, maybe we would evolve to be more complete human beings.

That and I’d like to know what the brain is experiencing when things that cannot rationally be explained (ghosts, ESP, etc.) are occurring.

i would make it so that you used all of your brain, id untapp the great unknown! hehe

..and so that everyone saw the inner beauty, not just the outter.
(kinda like shallow hal!)

:)

I’m curious. You know that your research question will be so much more narrow and specific than anything anyone except a fellow neuroscientist could tell you here. Are you looking for a general area, and then you’ll find the specific things that need to be learned within that area? Are you really agnostic about what you will study?

Surely you had an interest that drove you to get a graduate degree in this field. What was it?

Alzheimers. I’ve lost so many family members to it, and it scares the crap out of me.

I’d probably spend a huge amount of time and money on the fascinating, impractical, complicated and maddening question of why we can’t seem to reproduce human intelligence in computers.

Personally, I’m fascinated by the basis of short and long-term memory. How is it that you can “scan” your memory for something (say a name, or birthday), and (hopefully) eventually find what you are looking for? How are memories “fixed”? How does a neurologic network develop to create memories? How does neurologic deterioration affect memories, and vise versa.

Actually, if I could solve any problem about brains (after CC stuff because split brain fascinates me), I would probably work on schizophrenia. Even more specific? Safe, effective drugs to combat it. Right now to some extent we take a russian roulette approach to the drugs for it—they can have so many side effects that you end up taking practically an entire medicine cabinet to combat the drug you take to combat schizophrenia.

Finding a substitute for zombies.

I want to be able to use all of my brain, it must be there for a reason!

I’d pick Depression. It affects so many people, often from a very young age. The lack of energy and drive, coupled with the use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate prevent even the most brilliant mind from acheiving it’s full potential. If you could cure it, easily and early, it would have a huge impact on the world as a whole. The only downside I see is that the arts may suffer…so many great writers, artists, etc were/are tortured souls. Hmmm, I may have to rethink this…

nikipedia, the University of Kentucky does this type of research in a big way. They have all these really old nuns leaving them their brains to study.

@AP great link. thanks for sharing

One of the links they found so far was between cognitive ability in youth and alzheimers.

LOL

These answers are awful!!!

Hahahaha, can you imagine going into his office, and he goes, “So what type of project would you like to work on during your rotation?”

“I would like to cure Alzheimers, Parkinsons, or ADD.”

shilolo is one of the few with a legitimate research questions, but I don’t think cognitive memory work would necessarily be right for that lab (perhaps in the other you had been considering, though).

And EmpressPixie suggests work involving the corpus callosum, a fascinating structure, IMO.

While I’m sure you could negotiate your way into investigating any question, this is only a rotation, and I think you could benefit the most from rotation guidance by investigating something closely related to his field of expertise. I would strongly suggest carefully reading his most recent papers before the meeting. Reading the papers will naturally create new research questions for you, and he would think you were amazing if you employed my technique that we talked about the other night in the context of, “In paper X, you discussed the theoretical possibility of Y as related to your findings that Z. W suggests that Y is indeed a possibility, but I would suggest that we V in order to investigate this. This would be a feasible project for me to, at least, begin, during my rotation to you, and I believe it could greatly contribute to our understanding of Z.”

P.S. – All of the siblings of this question are me and you!!!

Well, girlofscience, you can’t really expect us to come up with viable research questions without a background in neuroscience, medicine, or microbiology and I doubt niki really expected us to be able to. We don’t know enough to even begin asking the right questions, so all we can do is wonder about generalities.

Also, the question does sort of inspire fantasy projects rather than realistic ones… “every piece of technology you could ever ask for” and “any problem that really interests you.” I mean, come on. What do you expect us to say?

I’m changing my answer actually. I wish to discover whether a functioning brain can be reproduced in a jello substrate. The project would cost three billion dollars and a lot of jello, but if it succeeded we would have the first jello-based artificial intelligence!

wow girlofscience. Way to ruin a good conversation.

@GOS “These answers are awful!!!”
Nice. Very nice.

When I read (and just re-read) the question, I still get the same request. Especially w/ the phrasing of the lead question “If you could solve any problem about brains, what would it be?”

Further niki said “hypothetically” and followed this w/ “every piece of technology available” and that she could work on “any problem”.

I didn’t intrepret this as an actual request for us to direct her future work. It seemed like an imaginary scenario.

I would study the specific neurological aberration resulting in the societal disassociation of persons who flatly insult fellow posters because their suggestions don’t conform to your personal assessment of a subjective question.

Perhaps my research would also reveal why they are so obviously self-impressed by their own perceived intelligence.

Therapeutic treatment for said unfortunate condition would necessarily include remedial instruction covering the finer points of healthy communication between humans (including a course entitled “How to send a private message between you and me”).

@ knot
LOL You are my hero/heroine.

@Hobbes, lapilofu, judochop, Snoopy, Knotmyday, and SoapChef:

Sorry!!! I was a bit tipsy when I responded to this last night, but either way, my intention was not nearly as hostile as some of your responses to me.

It’s a funny thing—how text cannot convey tone…

@daloon: I came into grad school with some vague ideas about what to study and find myself not wanting to be married to any one of them indefinitely. So this question was mostly for fun and inspiration—I hate to admit it, but there are moments when school has sapped me of my love for the subject, and I guess I was trying to get a little bit of it back.

@girlofscience: I still love you, drunkyface.

@niki. If you want some more serious ideas, feel free to PM me more specific areas you are considering. The field of neuroscience is so broad as to be impossible to narrow without some guidance from you.

@nikipedia: are there any professors there that you really like, either because of personality, or because of what they do?

What do they do?

For fun ideas, I think the brain-computer interface thing would be pretty cool. To be able to just think and control computers and equipment—wow! I wish I had it now. My fingers are hurting from too much typing.

Do you like animals? They use a lot of apes in that kind of research, I think. So it could be an added bonus if you like animals.

@GOS – I caught the tone.

Without a background in neuroscience, I wouldn’t know what problems to tackle, either. That’s because I don’t know much about any of the problems. That’s why I didn’t answer.

Do you do a lot of drunken Fluthering?

@Niki. One more thing. The latest issue of the journal Science has 4 cool neuroscience papers. Maybe one of them will spark your interest. Amazingly, there is even an essay on the formation of memories…

@shadling21: Thanks, glad you did!

I do indeed do a lot of drunken Fluthering. Haven’t you noticed most of my answers?

@ GOS: haha. Drunkin fluthering can cost one text misconception. I am guilty of it.

There is a large percentage of the brain that goes un-used.I would like to discover the means to fully use that which is going to waste.
Also many brain cells die as a matter of normal activity.I would also like to find a way to be able to reuse these cells that die as I have been made to understand these dead brain cells once lost are not re-placed.

I think I would make a water that you sit in that combines the male patterns of the brain with the female patterns.

Example

There is female patterns as well, commonly free thought, which in return comes from the right hemisphere, the female patter if let gone to far make a circle. A thought would be that if one was to repeat the same actions would be insanity and if you start and end at one point in a circle, well you get the point.
While that sounds bad it is rare to reach that point.

There is the left hemisphere which. From it is male patterns, commonly close minded, which makes the patterns of lines. It will go threw anything to prove that the theory which it is trying to creating is right. Kind of like when a scientist says:

We have new results that say vitamin C does not help at all for the Human bodies immune system. Then 2 months latter someone who went to debunk this statement says well you are right and wrong. Vitamin C helps, once you have caught the cold, go through its process faster.(This is just a fictional way of how a male pattern of thinking works)