To
in sentence
644965 examples of To in a sentence
But the people in Asia are starting
to
eat like we are, which is why they're starting
to
get sick like we are.
But in contrast
to
my evil twin who lusts after world domination, my motives are not sinister.
I control the brain in order
to
understand how it works.
Now wait a minute, you may say, how can you go straight
to
controlling the brain without understanding it first?
Even if we could measure what every cell is doing at all times, we would still have
to
make sense of the recorded activity patterns, and that's so difficult, chances are we'll understand these patterns just as little as the brains that produce them.
But we don't know where, since we don't know how
to
read the pattern.
To
make progress, we need
to
break the code.
An experienced code-breaker will tell you that in order
to
figure out what the symbols in a code mean, it's essential
to
be able
to
play with them,
to
rearrange them at will.
So in this situation too,
to
decode the information contained in patterns like this, watching alone won't do.
We need
to
rearrange the pattern.
In other words, instead of recording the activity of neurons, we need
to
control it.
And since I'm realistic, rather than grandiose, I don't claim that the ability
to
control the function of the nervous system will at once unravel all its mysteries.
Now, I'm by no means the first person
to
realize how powerful a tool intervention is.
The history of attempts
to
tinker with the function of the nervous system is long and illustrious.
It dates back at least 200 years,
to
Galvani's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond.
Galvani showed that a frog's legs twitched when he connected the lumbar nerve
to
a source of electrical current.
It's hard
to
do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit
to
the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.
So around the turn of the last century, I started
to
think, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if one could take this logic and turn it upside down?"
So instead of inserting a wire into one spot of the brain, re-engineer the brain itself so that some of its neural elements become responsive
to
diffusely broadcast signals such as a flash of light.
Such an approach would literally, in a flash of light, overcome many of the obstacles
to
discovery.
So each nerve cell with the right genetic makeup will spontaneously produce a receiver that allows us
to
control its function.
They are coupled
to
light receptors similar
to
the ones in your eyes.
You can exploit this
to
make sure that only some neurons contain our light-activated pore and others don't.
So in this cartoon, the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond
to
light because it lacks the light-activated pore.
The approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly
to
the brain.
You're familiar with these cells because they are the ones that frustrate you when you try
to
swat the fly.
Now
to
make sure that this was no reaction of the fly
to
a flash it could see, Susana did a simple but brutally effective experiment.
Anyway, as you'll see in a moment, Susana was able
to
turn on the flight motor of what's the equivalent of the spinal cord of these flies and get some of the headless bodies
to
actually take off and fly away.
Life is a string of choices creating a constant pressure
to
decide what
to
do next.
Now
to
put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model, we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject, fruit flies.
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