• Question: how much of the brain is understood

    Asked by anon-256904 to Luke on 11 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Luke Bryden

      Luke Bryden answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Hey Alex, great question. That’s a tough one really. I sometimes think we know very little about the brain, given it is the most complex thing known and difficult to study. But at the same time, we have progressed so much over the past century or so in how we have come to understand the brain and how important it is for everything we do. Luckily, many people are fascinated by it and there is a real drive to discover more about how it works in order to bring us to a stage where we can treat brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
      To go back to your question though, it really depends how you look at the brain. There are many ways it can be investigated — from right down to the chemicals that are important for transmitting information from one nerve cell to another, up to the level of monitoring the activity of the whole brain in a brain scanner, and everything in between. We have made great strides in understanding the brain at these levels, but one really tricky thing is linking these different bits of knowledge together in order to give us a whole picture. This is because the brain, as I said, is so very complicated.
      Every year we gain more and more information about how the brain works but each answer leads to 10+ more questions, so lots more to find out! Which is one reason why it is such an exciting subject.

Comments

  • Photo: Gulnar

    Gulnar commented on :

    Hello Alex, Thanks for a question. It is a difficult question to answer precisely.

    There are approximately 86 billion neurons, together with an estimated 100 trillion connections, or synapses in our brains. Imagine, how difficult to understand how the brain works as a system; how patterns of neural networks make connections across the brain to make up our behaviour, consciousness.

    Scientists know more information about the brain than the last decades. The development of various techniques, such as computed tomography (CT) scans, positron emission tomography (PET) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows science to learn more about the brain. A lot of neurotransmitters, hormones, functionality of brain regions have been studied intensively.

    But what is less know is understanding what exactly causes diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, brain cancer, epilepsy, Parkinsonism, mood disorders, and how we can prevent or stop them. In addition, however, some processes are known to be related to the subconscious, we are not sure about the mechanism behind it. Memory, sleeping, and cognition mechanisms are also in the grey areas of neuroscience.

    This field is significantly improving year by year. The more we know, the more questions occur.