Nature, nurture & neuroplasticity | Anthony Hannan | TEDxNorthernSydneyInstitute
Summary
TLDRThis talk delves into the enigmatic 'light bulb moment' in neuroscience, highlighting three transformative revolutions: neuroplasticity, which shows the brain's adaptability throughout life; genomics, promising personalized medicine through DNA sequencing; and epigenetics, revealing how environmental factors can alter gene expression. It emphasizes the brain's development, the impact of disorders, and the potential for new treatments, concluding with the hopeful message that our genetic destiny can be influenced by our experiences.
Takeaways
- 🧠 The 'light bulb moment' is a mystery in neuroscience and remains one of the exciting areas to explore.
- 🌟 Einstein's quotes highlight the importance of embracing the mysterious and the awe it inspires, which is also true for understanding the brain.
- 🧬 The brain is a complex 'mind machine' with 100 billion neurons and a thousand trillion synapses, unlike any supercomputer.
- 🔄 Neuroplasticity is a revolutionary concept showing the brain's ability to change and adapt throughout life, not just in childhood.
- 📈 Experience and environment can alter brain connections, even leading to the birth of new neurons in adulthood.
- 🧪 Brain scans reveal how the brain develops and changes from childhood to adulthood, influenced by experiences.
- 🌐 Brain and mind disorders affect a significant portion of the population, emphasizing the importance of understanding and treating them.
- 🧬 Genomics is revolutionizing healthcare with the potential for personalized medicine through DNA sequencing.
- 🌿 Environmental factors play a crucial role in brain disorders, and understanding them is key to developing treatments.
- 🧬 Epigenetics refers to changes above the genome, influencing how genes express themselves without altering the DNA sequence.
- 🏋️♂️ Cognitive stimulation and physical activity can have therapeutic effects, potentially delaying the onset of brain disorders.
Q & A
What is the 'light bulb moment' in neuroscience?
-The 'light bulb moment' is a metaphor for a sudden realization or a moment of insight. The neuroscience behind it remains a mystery, making it an exciting area of study.
What are the three revolutions mentioned in the script that will transform lives in the 21st century?
-The three revolutions are neuroplasticity, genomics, and epigenetics. These revolutions have the potential to transform our understanding of the brain and mind, leading to advancements in healthcare and treatment of brain disorders.
How does neuroplasticity challenge the previous understanding of the adult brain?
-Neuroplasticity challenges the previous understanding that the adult brain is fixed by showing that the brain can change its structure and function throughout life, not just in childhood.
What is the significance of the brain's ability to change its connections and even create new neurons in adulthood?
-The ability to change connections and create new neurons in adulthood is significant because it demonstrates the brain's adaptability and capacity for growth, which can have implications for learning, memory, and recovery from brain injuries.
How does the brain's development continue throughout life?
-The brain's development continues throughout life as it forms new connections and modifies existing ones in response to experiences and the environment.
What is the impact of brain and mind disorders on the population?
-Brain and mind disorders affect a significant portion of the population, with 75% of individuals expected to suffer from at least one such disorder in their lifetime.
How does genomics revolutionize healthcare?
-Genomics revolutionizes healthcare by enabling the sequencing of an individual's entire genome at a low cost. This can lead to personalized and precision medicine tailored to an individual's genetic makeup.
What is the role of environmental factors in brain disorders?
-Environmental factors play a significant role in brain disorders, often interacting with genetic predispositions to influence the development and progression of these conditions.
What was the outcome of the experiment involving mice with Huntington's disease and environmental enrichment?
-The experiment showed that mice with Huntington's disease that received increased cognitive stimulation and physical activity experienced a dramatic delay in the onset and progression of the disease.
How does epigenetics differ from genetics?
-Epigenetics refers to chemical modifications to DNA that can affect gene expression without changing the DNA sequence itself, whereas genetics involves the study of genes and their variations.
What is the concept of 'brain reserve' and how can it be beneficial?
-The concept of 'brain reserve' suggests that increased cognitive stimulation and physical activity can build a neuroprotective reserve within the brain, potentially delaying the onset of neurodegenerative diseases.
Outlines
💡 The Mystery of the Light Bulb Moment
The speaker begins by acknowledging the elusive nature of understanding the 'light bulb moment' from a neurobiological perspective. They emphasize the excitement of working in an area where answers are not yet known. The speaker then introduces three revolutions that will impact lives in the 21st century. They quote Albert Einstein, highlighting the beauty of the mysterious as a source of art and science. The brain is described as a 'mind machine' with 100 billion neurons and a thousand trillion synapses, contrasting it with supercomputers that lack 'light bulb moments.' The first revolution discussed is neuroplasticity, which challenges the old belief that the adult brain is fixed. The speaker explains how experiences and the environment can change the brain's structure and function, even leading to the creation of new neurons in adulthood.
🧬 The Genomics Revolution and Brain Disorders
The second paragraph focuses on the genomics revolution, where the cost of sequencing a person's genome is dropping rapidly, leading to personalized and precision medicine. The speaker discusses the prevalence of brain and mind disorders, affecting 75% of the population at some point in their lives. They emphasize the importance of understanding and treating these disorders. The speaker then delves into the relationship between genetics and environmental factors in causing brain disorders. They share a personal experience with Alzheimer's disease and present statistics on the global impact of brain disorders. The speaker also discusses the need for a comprehensive approach to understanding these disorders, combining genetic data with environmental data.
🌿 The Impact of Environment on Brain Health
In the third paragraph, the speaker shares a 'light bulb moment' from their research on a mouse model of Huntington's disease. They found that environmental enrichment, including increased cognitive stimulation and physical activity, could delay the onset and progression of the disease. The speaker suggests that neuroplasticity at the cellular level may be responsible for this effect. They introduce the concept of the 'epigenetic landscape,' explaining how genetic and environmental factors influence brain development and the potential for disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. The speaker concludes by discussing the concept of 'brain reserve,' which can be built through cognitive stimulation and physical activity, potentially protecting against diseases like Alzheimer's. They propose the idea of 'enviromemetics' as a new therapeutic approach that could mimic the beneficial effects of cognitive stimulation and exercise.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Neuroscience
💡Neuroplasticity
💡Genomics
💡Epigenetics
💡Brain Disorders
💡Cognitive Stimulation
💡Physical Activity
💡Huntington's Disease
💡Synapses
💡Brain Reserve
💡Enviromemetics
Highlights
Understanding the 'light bulb moment' is one of the mysteries of neuroscience.
Three revolutions will transform lives in the 21st century.
Albert Einstein's quote on the mysterious being a source of all true art and science.
The brain is a mind machine with 100 billion neurons connected by a thousand trillion synapses.
The revolution of neuroplasticity shows the adult brain is not fixed and can change throughout life.
Neuroplasticity involves how experience and environment sculpt the brain.
The brain is the only organ that never stops developing.
MRI brain scans show the brain's development from age 5 to 20.
1.5 billion people worldwide are affected by brain and mind disorders.
The revolution of genomics allows sequencing of the entire human genome for a few hundred dollars.
Genomics and environmental data are needed to understand complex brain disorders.
A study on a mouse model of Huntington's disease showed environmental enrichment can delay disease progression.
Neuroplasticity at the cellular level allows for new connections and may be therapeutic for brain diseases.
The revolution of epigenetics refers to chemical modifications of DNA without changing its sequence.
Epigenetics and neuroplasticity suggest our genomes and brains may be maladapted to current environments.
The concept of brain reserve is relevant to disorders like Alzheimer's disease.
Cognitive stimulation and physical activity build a neuroprotective reserve within the brain.
Enviromemetics are potential new therapeutics that mimic the effects of cognitive stimulation and physical exercise.
Neuroplasticity and brain reserve can shift the pathway towards healthy brain maturation and function.
Transcripts
the light bulb moment
so if you're expecting me to come here
and tell you the neurobiology
of the light bulb moment
then you'll be disappointed and you can
leave now
understanding the light bulb moment is
one of the mysteries of neuroscience we
don't have the answers and it makes it
an extraordinarily exciting area to work
in
what i will tell you about
are three revolutions which will
transform your lives and the lives of
everyone in the 21st century
i have here three quotes from albert
einstein one of the greatest minds of
the 20th century
my favorite one
is the final quote
the most beautiful thing we can
experience
is the mysterious
it is a source of all true art and all
science
he to whom this emotion is a stranger
who can no longer pause to wonder and
stand wrapped in awe
is as good as dead
his eyes are closed
you can see from the first quote that
even for a genius
light bulb moments don't come easily
so the brain is a mind machine
i use this term
used in a book by that name by colin
blakemore
a couple of decades ago
there's 100 billion neurons connected by
a thousand trillion synapses the
connections between them
so the most powerful supercomputers in
the world
don't have light bulb moments
it's this kilogram and a half of soft
tissue in your skulls that facilitates
everything you feel
everything you think
and everything you do
so the first revolution i'll tell you
about
is the revolution of neuroplasticity
so until a couple of decades ago
we thought the adult brain was fixed
it was a machine it was like a computer
so this revolution involves
understanding
how your experience how the environment
sculpts your brain not just in childhood
but in adulthood it changes connections
between neurons
it can even cause the birth of new
neurons in your adult brain
and hopefully
if you do remember anything from this
talk
that will have left a structural and a
functional change in your brain
that allows you
to remember it and maybe helps you
generate your own
light bulb moment
here's a type of brain plasticity that
you can all understand
that of learning and memory
neurons that wire together
fire together
so it's the connections between them
that are important
so the brain is unique in another way
it's the only organ in the body that
never stops developing
you can see here images developed from
mri brain scans in healthy individuals
from the age of five
through to twenty
if you look at the bottom left what you
see there is a change in the brain in
childhood you have extra connections and
you have more gray matter in the
cerebral cortex and your experience
over this period in fact throughout your
life
sculpts your brain
which is what is shown there in the
changing that occurs in the thickness of
the gray matter during this period
on the bottom right
is the brain shown from the right side
so we're not just doing this for
curiosity
at the floor institute we're looking at
a range of brain and mind disorders and
so i've shown here just some of the
brain and mind disorders and other
neurological disorders
that we work on
so i want to show of hands
so could everyone in the audience who's
been personally affected who's had a
family member
or a friend affected by one or more of
these brain disorders could you raise
your hand
well that's extraordinary but expected
so my dear aunt died a few months ago
after suffering horribly from
alzheimer's disease
and she had a very bright mind so it was
absolutely shocking to see it completely
dimmed
by dementia
and so it's often that we only
understand the power of the human brain
when we see it
destroyed by brain disease
so here's some numbers for you
you can see
1.5 billion in rising people affected
worldwide by brain and mind disorders
and you see there that 75 of the
population will suffer from at least one
brain disorder
in their lifetime
so we hear almost every day
that our country is facing another
crisis so the question is what can be
more important
than learning how to prevent
to treat and eventually cure
these
and other diseases
of the brain and the body
so on to the second revolution
this is a revolution of genomics
so we're rapidly reaching a point where
the three billion base pairs of dna
in your genome in every cell in your
body
can be sequenced for less than a few
hundred dollars per person
this will mean that you will carry your
genome probably on a credit card sized
device
that you will hand it to your gp and
other healthcare professionals and
clinicians
and this will dictate the way in which
personalized and precision medicine is
delivered to you
providing our health care systems
can support that new technology
but it will change your lives
so back to brain and mind disorders
each one of them is caused by a
combination of genetic
and environmental factors
you can see some of these major brain
disorders listed here
so there's a lot of focus on genomics
the study
of the genome
of all individuals those who are healthy
those with particular diseases
however i would suggest that in parallel
what we need
is a field of environments where we
gather data on individuals which needs
to go from conception through to old age
quantitative data hard data on large
populations which is what's happening
with genomics at the moment and we need
to put those two together
that's the level of information we need
to understand the cause of these very
complex brain disorders and to use that
information to develop new treatments
all right here's a little slide here for
the geneticists in the audience i assume
there are none
so in order to understand a disease we
need a good model
and to do that we need to sort the sheep
from the goats
i'm going to tell you now about
a light bulb moment that i had
so we were studying
a mouse model of huntington's disease
and at the time in the 1990s it was
considered the epitome of genetic
determinism 100
genetic it's a fatal brain disease
inherited by half the children when one
of the parents has huntington's disease
so i wanted to challenge the dogma and
with a graduate student anton van delen
what we did was divide the mice up into
those that received standard housing
conditions were a little bit boring
and those conditions in which there was
increased cognitive stimulation
and increased physical activity
and what we found in this experiment was
quite striking
you can see here a measure
in this graph
of huntington's disease the symptoms
going up with standard housing to 100
percent
in this adult mouse model of
huntington's disease
what we found if you see
in the bottom of the graph with
environmental enrichment there was a
dramatic delay
in onset and progression of huntington's
disease due to this increased cognitive
stimulation
and physical activity
so how might this happen
one of the ways we think this might
happen
is at the level of neuroplasticity of
individual cells
so neurons are the most extraordinary
cells in the body
a single neuron can receive thousands of
connections or synapses from other
neurons
and it's this complexity that allows the
brain to process
enormous amounts of information
but it also allows for an enormous
amount
of neuroplasticity
so you can see an example here
whereby the environmental enrichment
leads to the creation of new connections
new synapses and this may be the way in
which it can actually be therapeutic
with respect to these kind of brain
diseases
so on to the third revolution
this is the revolution of epigenetics
so what this refers to you can see the
beautiful double helical strand of dna
that has
molecules attached to it so it refers to
chemical modification of dna essentially
it's above the genome without changing
the
letters of dna
so what you're seeing here
is
an epigenetic landscape this term comes
back to conrad waddington and the first
description of epigenetics
so imagine on this
epigenetic landscape
that the rolling stone
is brain development
and this is partly dictated by the
genetics which dictates the trajectory
of brain development along particular
pathways
the rest of this pathway is dictated by
the environment
and experience
and it can shift development in
different ways
now what we know
is that genomes evolve
over thousands of years
so essentially you have the genome
and the brain and the body that's very
similar to that of our hunter-gatherer
ancestors
so if any particular disease including
brain disorders is changing in incidence
or prevalence
the implication is not that the genome
is changing
it's that there are changes in
environment which perhaps our genomes
and our brains and our bodies
are maladapted to
this may have relevance to disorders of
brain development for example
autism and schizophrenia
another implication of this
epigenetics and neuroplasticity
is the concept of brain reserve
so brain reserve may be most relevant
to disorders such as alzheimer's disease
and other forms of dementia
what occurs here is that this increased
cognitive stimulation and physical
activity
builds a neuroprotective reserve within
the brain
now the concept is that if we can
understand how this cognitive
stimulation physical activity
is protective and beneficial at the
level of molecules and the level of
cells
then we could develop
enviromemetics
these would be new therapeutics which
mimic or enhance the beneficial effects
of this cognitive stimulation and
physical exercise
so finally
we're all dealt a genetic deck of cards
at conception that we can do nothing
about
many of us due to our genomes and our
genetic predisposition
start to move down the red pathway
towards a particular brain disorder
however
thanks to neuroplasticity and brain
reserve
this pathway can be shifted towards the
left
the green pathway which is the pathway
that we all want to be on
so this would be the pathway
where we have
healthy brain maturation
brain function
and aging
so that these light bulb moments can
continue throughout life
thank you
you
関連動画をさらに表示
How genetics and environment work together to shape our destiny: Milena Georgieva at TEDxAUBG
Epigenetics: Unraveling the Mysteries of Nature & Nurture | Natalia Husby | TEDxUniversityofDelaware
Genius Insight | Epigenetics and Twin Studies
Gene Expression Review Song
Do We Have Free Will? | Robert Sapolsky & Andrew Huberman
What is epigenetics? - Carlos Guerrero-Bosagna
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