Shaping brain structure
so
who in this room has a brain
okay everybody has a brain so um
i think this is a good a good thing
because this enabled us
to listen to the ted talks that came
before me
to move to sit to feel
to be social to be antisocial
to laugh to sing
so i’m going to tell you why mapping the
brain and understanding its anatomy and
function
is important to understand ourselves and
also
important to understand brain disorder
so here i have a plastic brain which is
sort of
life-size it would fit in my head and as
you see it’s a bit
pinkish and it’s really like folded
which is super
convenient because in this way you
actually have a much bigger surface than
the brain is and the brain i’ll just put
this here
it’s has multiple regions or
lobes so you have the cortex which is
here
you have the cerebellum also called the
little brain
the brain stem it’s a cortical regions
which you don’t really see here
and also the corpus callosum which is
like the bridge between the two halves
of the brain
so looking inside brain
we have a map here you see also that
there’s a cortex
which is in light gray and below it is
the white matter
which is conveniently here in black
because i inverted the image
so importantly the white matter connects
the regions
of your cortex and helps them to form a
network which is also
seen here so you have regions that are
connected
and looking at the anatomy of the brain
this was something researchers or in
general people started to care about
around like mid 1900s
century because before they didn’t
really thought the brain was that
important for our thoughts for our minds
but then they thought maybe maybe it is
a cool organ maybe we should look at it
further
and actually the brain although it’s
pink here
it has a variable cyto architecture so
the layers of the brain
they have different distributions of
cell depending on which region
and this tells us also something about
the function that it’s processing
so right here you have the central
circuits and the
somatocentric cortex and this is the
region where you
feel and move and here in the back
there’s a visual cortex
which is roughly the region that helps
us see
but between these regions there’s a lot
of
brain i can tell you that and these
regions they help us to pay attention
to feel your feelings or to interpret
your feelings and control them
but also to have theory of mind to think
about the minds of other peoples
but also thinking about your own
perspective
so what is kind of what i find super
cool is that these structures they are
organized in a certain hierarchical way
so
the most distance from these primary
regions that support
seeing feeling moving are functions that
support our social our abstract mind
that help us to detach from reality
but also help us to cross the boundary
from within my head
to your head because in this way we can
also be social and understand
other people and we can cooperate think
about their mind think how we all can
act together such as in a climate crisis
so it is super relevant to know how it
works and what is the biology of this
not only to understand the brain and the
mind but also to understand what is the
biology that helps us to act together
and overcome our boundaries
so the pink brain is cool i like holding
it i like puzzling with it but it’s of
course not a real brain right so
the question is how can we look at a
brain
because we all have it but it’s it’s
inside our school and like i could kill
you all and look at your brain but that
would be
well not so productive and a bit morbid
and also a bit stationary because then i
will have one state of your brain
so what we do have and which is great
thing is that we have
mri which stands for magnetic resonance
imaging and this is maybe some of you
have been in an mri scanner
this is like a big magnet and it
pulsates
so you magnetize the hydrogen molecules
or
look in your head or in your body and
you move them to a certain direction so
you change their so-called spin
and then they start resonating and with
radio frequency
coils you can measure differences in how
they spin
and by this way using physics and for
rear transformations
reinvert the photo of your brain and
make a figure
like the one above here and using
different
technical approaches you can measure
different aspects of the brain
such as its function its structure and
its connectivity
so speaking about connectivity you see
here these nicely colored
well pathways between regions and this
is a way to to understand
how brain regions are connected and this
is an
example of structural connectivity but
you have also functional connectivity
which
points to the same thing because it’s
all about the relationship between
different brain regions and and how this
matters to our function
and to our understanding of our mind
so i work a lot with networks and
previously there was also a talk about
computer science
and and i like this yeah using
computational approaches
to understand big complicated systems
such as our brain
and above me you see a twin a pair of
twins
they’re also nasa astronauts which is
great
but for now it’s more important that
they’re mono-psychotic twins
which means that they’re genetically
about 100
identical on the other hand we all
know about dicyclotic twins and they are
not 100 identical they’re about 50
identical and then we also have cousins
for example which is about
25 identical so in this way you can get
a
so-called pedigree of genetic similarity
and using this information and using the
information that we have on the brain
we can compare how heritable every of a
specific feature is of our behavior or
our brain
and in this way we know what is the role
of genetics
in a certain aspect of brain
organization and this is
a thing i’m curious about because we
have this brain but
how did it come the way it is and how
much of it
is genetically determined and and if so
why and
to answer the why question we also have
to look at evolution
because we’re humans but we’re also
primates and
non-human primates such as the macaque
monkey you see over there
they also have a brain and it’s roughly
similar to that of humans but there are
also a lot of differences
and by understanding what are the
similarities between humans
and for example macaques we can know
what evolution
revolutionaries changed but also what
remained
the same and what are the evolutionary
organizational principles
that shape our brain and also shape our
mind
so what i found was that there are two
main organizational axes
that sort of shape the brain and
organize the brain and determine
where a certain region may be and one of
them goes from the back here
to the front of the brain and this is
has to do with neurogenesis so the time
point at which new neurons are born
and also how these neurons behave
whether they’re really well connected
or more local phenomena and
interestingly this axis also relates
from
vision to abstract thought so there’s
also
like more a behavioral relevance to this
axis
the other axis went from the bottom
bottom
to the upside so the inferior to the
superior part of your brain
and this axis relates to a theory of the
dual origin it’s called and it
says that like the brain has like a
differentiable
cyto architecture so so cells of
different brain regions they look
different in a sort of systematic way in
the brain
and this relates to the distance of
these two origins which are called the
hippocampus
and the olfactory cortex but you can
immediately forget it but
what is important that this is also a
relevant organizational principle of the
brain
and it’s seen in humans and macaques and
it’s heritable
and the upper part helps us understand
where
a thing is in a broad sense of where it
is and the lower part helps us
understand what is it
and what does it mean for us
so great access brain mapping
compass maybe we can like know where we
are and how evolution and genes shapes
shape what is inside our head but yeah
what does it mean for our thoughts like
aren’t we all like learning here in
school and if it’s all genetically
determined like
can we change and am i when i have my
thoughts i quit my goal
is this because my parents gave me these
genes or
because of evolution well no luckily
luckily not the brain is also built in a
way that we
can be flexible we can adapt we can
adapt to this changing environment we
can act upon the climate crisis
because our brain is built like it is so
we can we can change
or in different ways of course and
sometimes we cannot change but in
principle
we’re adaptive beings we can move
so one of the questions is that what
happens how can we change how can we
train our minds to be more attentive to
be more compassionate
to take more perspective and this is a
study i did in my
um or i started in my phd in the lab of
tanya singer
and we trained like three different
skills
the first one was about presence and
this is like feeling attention
feeling that you are in a body feeling
this interceptive feeling
um and understanding your breath so
maybe we can dim the lights a bit and
then
we can do a quick exercise here to
become a little bit more present
in case you are not there yet so
the lights are a bit dimp now slowly
and then if you want you can close your
eyes if you trust me but you can keep
them open
and you start breathing slowly
and then you feel your toes getting warm
and this warmth this attentive warmth
creeps up
to your ankles
to your knees
to your hips
and now you pay attention to your whole
leg and it’s warm
then the warmth creeps up to your belly
button
to your breast your shoulders
and then also your fingers get warm
your elbows your shoulders
the point of your nose your eyebrows
and then the upper part of your head
so you’ve now feel this attentive warmth
in your whole body
and maybe breathe out once twice and
open your eyes again
and thank you for undimming the lights
so this was an exercise to feel more
attentive of your body and and
like that we’re all part of not only
we’re not only in our head we’re also a
body right
and another important feature
that we’ve also talked about relative to
refugees in moria for example is
feeling compassion for other people
feeling feelings of care
and caring for people even that we don’t
know and this is this is something that
is not always natural to us right
we love the people we love we have our
friends but apart from that like do we
really care about the lady at the
supermarket
even if she’s like neutrally friendly
so an exercise to try to improve this is
loving-kindness meditation
and in doing so you first feel this
loving and kindness that you hopefully
feel for
some of your family members and for your
friends
and then you expand this to the nice
lady or mr in the supermarket
to the maybe not so friendly lady at the
bakery
and then you expand it further to the
people you don’t know
for example i feel this for you guys in
the audience i don’t know you well but
i can feel loving kindness for you and
then you expand it also
to people you really don’t know that are
far away maybe in the camps of moriah
and then you exercise to feel this also
for people you don’t understand
and don’t know and by feeling this
loving kindness and practicing
this feeling of warmth towards people
you don’t know
you can also maybe increase your
compassion
and on the other hand compassion and
having feelings it also has to do with
emotions and understand that
i have positive emotions i have negative
emotions in myself
and other people have it and i don’t
always understand the emotions
my friends or my kids or my partner feel
but talking about them
and realizing other people have feelings
too is a helpful thing so we did this
diatic exercise
with one other partner and the idea was
you speak for five minutes
in two minutes or two and a half you say
the positive things of your day
what make you feel happy for example
i was happy the sun was shining this
morning it made me feel really
really great and and the coffee tastes
so so good this morning it made me feel
super happy
and i’m so thankful for being here and
that the coffee is okay like this really
made my day but on the other hand
i also have some negative emotions for
example
my kid has this problem with getting
dressed like like he makes
huge tantrums he’s two so it’s normal
but still it’s really like
making me also sad and angry that it’s
always like this
this fight with him like 15 minutes and
i have to like
hold him really tightly and still he
doesn’t understand he needs a new diaper
and
as a parent this is just like takes so
much energy
and then and then i have to be here and
i’m tired and nobody cares and
you know so that’s that’s two things of
me and i i bet you guys
always have also positive and negative
emotions about your day so
by sharing this and listening also and
listening is important
to other people’s feelings you might
also be able to
to improve your compassion and to get
more aware of your
emotions on the other hand
emotions are cool but luckily we’re not
only emotional people we also have
a cognitive rationale side and this is
about having perspectives and different
roles
in your life so on the one hand you can
take perspective on your own thoughts
you can watch them go by you can think
okay i’m like in a train station of my
own mind and i see my mind think oh god
i’m bored or okay
what am i doing here what is what is she
talking about or
interesting the brain yeah
but on the other hand you also have
different roles in yourself so earlier i
mentioned i’m a mother
but i’m also well the child of two
people and these are different roles to
my parents i can still also act like a
child
but to my kids ideally i don’t i’m the
adult there
and right now i’m giving you kind of a
lecture right i’m explaining you about
the brain but
i also i know a bit about the brain
obviously but i’m also
i learned still i’m also still a student
and these roles
they of course also like changed the way
i approached
certain situations and i guess everybody
in this room
is also a child of parents right and and
it’s also a student a person that is
still learning but
it’s also teaching other people what is
right and wrong
maybe so so by acknowledging these roles
and also
telling about a certain perspective
about a certain live event
you and recognizing that other people
also talk about a certain perspective
about their
life events you can get a better it’s
called theory of mind
so understand that people have a
different mind than you and a different
perspective
from where they come from and also by
understanding it
might also be easier to to break the
boundaries that are within me
and the boundary that is in you so maybe
when i talked about my kids some
people that are also parents were like i
i know this so you kind of bond by
sharing
a certain aspect of you
cool social behavior complex behaviors
i guess a lot of examples already came
by in the talks
before me and what is kind of for me as
a
neuroscientist it’s also cool that these
behaviors relate to different
network so to call and regions of the
brain and
for convenience they’re called yellow
which is attention
red which is this compassion emotion and
on the other hand
green which is this theory of mind
taking perspective
and what to me as a more network-based
interested person and also interested in
the topology and place of functions and
behavior in the brain
it’s super nice that they have a
sequence right like it’s like
yellow red green yellow red green it’s a
pattern that emerges all over the brain
there seems to be some logic to it
and this might also tell us something
about the evolution
and the genetic development and
background of these regions
but i guess this is nice but
yeah you were maybe curious like okay
you can do these exercises and we did
this for three months each of these
three
blogs with people and we scanned them
before and after
and before i said the brain is a network
so let’s say this is a brain
and these are the regions and these are
the connections
so when you’re alive the brain can
integrate and segregate so regions can
become relatively functionally more
similar
or more dissimilar and what we found
when you do this mindfulness attention
so you do sort of a relaxation
is that also your brain your brain
doesn’t relax but in a way it relaxes
because regions
they become more segregated from each
other
on the other hand when you do this
effortful theory of mind and think about
your own perspectives and others
perspective
that’s not always easy and also your
brain
responds like that and you see that
regions they integrate more and they
become
closer together because this makes
information processing
across different networks more efficient
and on the other hand we didn’t find any
significant results for for emotions but
what it might be is that emotions are
like the glue
that balance these two end points so to
say of segregation
and integration so to me this is super
exciting
like i don’t understand every aspect of
it but
like it’s super exciting how this
dynamic network that is the brain
can change with experience and also can
learn
so great i’m a basic researcher
um i i do a lot of statistics behind my
computer
i calculate p-values which tell us how
relevant it is and
i told you about the brain and about
some evolution some theory and
okay but but what does it mean and i
already tried to convey why
understanding the brain can also help us
understand
not how to deal with the climate crisis
but why it’s so difficult to make people
cooperate
and how to how to improve that and how
to reach people
and we all have minds and it is relevant
to know
how they work because on the one hand we
can understand behavior a little bit
better
and also how to change it but on the
other hand
i read that one in four people have a
mental or
neurological disorder during their
lifetime and
maybe some of you know people or are
those people that have these issues
and it’s really hard to cure or or to
help these people that suffer
from such conditions and my my hope is
that by mapping the brain
and understanding on the one hand it’s
evolution and it’s genetic basis
and on the other hand also how it might
change in healthy people and
understanding
whether such changes can also occur in
people with disorder
this helps us really to understand maybe
disease and to find
new cures or approaches to connect with
these people
so with that i want to close and i
believe really that mapping the brain
helps us to understand where we are and
where we want to be
thank you
you