What if I studied Neuroscience, but could never touch a brain?
Emma Palmer
I met Emma in the Perceptual and Cognitive Neuroscience lab I worked in from 19-22. She left in 2024 upon graduating. When I first met her, she was stoic, older, very knowledgable, and intriguing. I was intimidated by her solemnness. I frequently and blatantly asked her questions about things I didn’t know. I eventually discovered that her solemness was really better described as dry humor and a very refreshing earnesty. I succeeded in not annoying her too much, and I’m now very glad to call her a close friend, even after she escaped cow town (Starkville, MS) to work on her Ph.D. in Michigan.
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I have dedicated 6+ years to studying neuroscience, but I have never touched a brain (kind of). I’ve touched plastinated brains, which are treated with a kind of plastic to make them turn waxy, but it isn’t the same. I’ve dissected fly brains under a microscope. I’ve never even gotten my hands on a human brain tissue sample (yet).
It seems kind of odd, but, like many neuroscientist predecessors, the work I want to do doesn’t require actual brains. Sure, they are useful. Mammalian models are really great tools to study neurological diseases, but they aren’t the only tool and they may not even be the most useful tool.
I want to study neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and hereditary ataxias. There are many ways to study these disease without touching brains. There are the somewhat more obvious ones — brain imaging and clinical trials using real patients. But how do the drugs we use in clinical trials get discovered and developed? Before they are given to humans or even mice and monkeys, they are studied in things that aren’t brains. The drugs and disease can be studied in cell models. Yes. We can grow neurons in a dish. And we can mutate them to produce diseases. We can then add drugs to these dishes and monitor if they help the cells survive. We can create “brain” organoids by scaffolding these cultured cells into a three dimensional structure with multiple cell types. This is particularly useful for neurodegenerative diseases that seemed to have a vascular component like Alzheimer’s. We can study how the disease and drugs impact the connections and interactions between cells of the organoids.
It seems counterintuitive, but we can also study diseases abiotically. Without life. Chemistry and physic are critical to understand how the chemical structures of drugs interact with biochemical signaling molecules. These systems can be modeled outside of cells just in a solution.
I have had some experience with most of the methods I have described. These techniques have allowed me, and many others, to gain a deep understanding of the brain and neurological disease.
Tomorrow (October 22, 2024) I will get my hands on a live mouse brain for the first time, and I will deepen my understanding of how it works and how things go wrong.
Despite never touching a live human brain, I have seen them and seen their activity. I have performed dozens of EEGs on willing volunteers to study things like their attentional processes and visual memory. The first time I saw those brain waves was amazing and somewhat nostalgic. My curiosity about the brain began about 15 years ago when I had to get my neurologist gave me an EEG. I remember being so enthralled and confused by the fact that this doctor man could see things from inside my brain. Even now, I desperately want to understand myself further by visualizing the structures of my brain. I am currently taking neuroanatomy as part of my PhD program curriculum. I am learning about all of the structures and pathways that make being a living, breathing, feeling, thinking human possible. I’ve seen some fMRI images of Zoé’s brain. I feel as though just scrolling through the images (in an attempt to study for my exam) has helped me understand her cognition and personality on a fundamental level. I long for that same understanding of my own brain.
I don’t know if I will ever touch a real human brain. I’m not even quite sure I want to. My understanding of the brain feels very real but on a certain level I know it is extremely limited by my experience. Would I still want to study the brain if I couldn’t ever see or touch one? I think so, but I can’t really say for sure. If seeing brains was common, would I find neuroscience to be more trivial? Maybe. All I know is that I am deeply curious about how and why our brains and cognition degrade as we age and that we are an amalgamation of everything we have ever experienced. That experience is evident on the molecular, cellular, synaptic, systems, and behavioral level. Neuroscience is the only way I know to understand that.”
*The gif on the left is taken from Emma’s neuroscience bootcamp when she learned more basic imaging techniques upon entering the grad program. I don’t claim this video as my own, and rights are reserved to University of Michigan and were used for training purposes.