The Allen Institute’s OpenScope program lets scientists study the weird workings of the brain — for instance, how magic mushrooms work their psychedelic magic on individual neurons, how memories of the past influence perceptions of the present, and how the brain’s visual system interprets motion and texture.
But one of the program’s leaders, neuroscientist Jerome Lecoq, says he’s really excited about an experiment that hasn’t yet been fully defined. It’s a study that could support a theory about the mechanism by which sensory data is fed into our consciousness — to modify our view of the world, and perhaps to modify our behavior as well.
The experiment is being fine-tuned online by an international community of researchers, through an open-source process that the Seattle-based Allen Institute fittingly calls a “brainstorm.”
“You can just go and follow us on Twitter and visit the Google Doc,” Lecoq says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “We’re going to meet in two weeks and a half in Boston at a conference and discuss this experiment. The document is very open. If you have a good idea, please chime in.”
For centuries, scientists have been trying to figure out how the brain works — and for decades, authors and filmmakers have been delving into the mysteries of consciousness, in works including Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” and the movie “Altered States.” A psychoactive drug plays a fictional role in the recently released Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller “Dark Matter” — by helping its users cope with the strangeness of jumping between alternate universes.
But there’s nothing strange about the experiments being done at the Allen Institute’s Brain Observatory. The institute’s late founder, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Paul Allen, created the Brain Observatory to play the same role in neuroscience that the Hubble Space Telescope plays in astronomy, or that the Large Hadron Collider plays in physics.
The Allen Brain Observatory studies how thousands of neurons across the mouse brain respond to stimuli, mostly having to do with the brain’s visual system. One of its best-known (and arguably craziest) experiments involved having mice watch the first three minutes of Orson Welles’ film-noir classic, “Touch of Evil,” to see how their brain cells processed the moving images.
Every year, the Allen Institute solicits outside proposals for research that could take advantage of the Brain Observatory’s tools. The OpenScope process follows the model used for reserving research time on the LHC and the Hubble Space Telescope (and, for that matter, on the James Webb Space Telescope as well).
“We thought that, moving forward, it will be really impactful if scientists across the community could propose projects — essentially, make a marketplace of ideas, where neuroscientists across the world could put their ideas forward,” Lecoq says. “And then we run the experiment with them, and make the data set available in the same way to the broad community.”
The experiments are supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
This year’s brainstorm project adds a crowdsourcing twist to the usual process. The general focus of the planned experiment has to do with a theory of brain function known as predictive coding.
The theory suggests that the brain is constantly generating and updating a mental model of the environment — and that sensory inputs are processed with the goal of identifying and correcting any errors in that model. “I would say predictive coding is probably what is feeding your consciousness,” Lecoq says.
But how does the error-correcting process work? Right now, that’s a mystery. “The question in that theory is, where is the error calculated in the brain? Which neurons are doing this computation?” Lecoq says.
Researchers are contributing online to a nearly 40-page document that outlines potential experiments to address that question. “There are six experiments already laid out,” Lecoq says. “We’ll see where that leads us. Eventually, we’re going to have a poll throughout the community and see which experiments are the most impactful, and we’ll run it.”
The predictive coding experiment isn’t the only item on this year’s OpenScope agenda. Four other research projects have been selected to advantage of the Allen Brain Observatory’s data-gathering pipeline:
What makes cells go psychedelic? A project led by researchers at Humboldt University of Berlin will focus on how psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, changes the activity of neurons in living mice. One of the project leaders, Roberto de Filippo, said in a news release that the experiment could provide “fundamental insights into the processes that govern perception, cognition, and consciousness itself.”
Studies have already shown that psilocybin can counter medication-resistant cases of depression and anxiety, and Lecoq says the OpenScope study could suggest ways to fine-tune psychedelic drugs for clinical applications. “The hope is that we can identify which cell type is impacted and understand better how this drug works, perhaps to design more targeted therapeutic substances in the future,” he says.
How does the past shape our present worldview? Researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science will analyze brain activity in mice to understand how the brain’s visual system reacts to changes over time. Lecoq says the researchers were inspired by the Allen Brain Observatory study involving movie-watching mice.
“Our animals were watching a movie [that was playing in] a loop, and they saw that the animals actually learned when the movie goes back to the beginning,” Lecoq says. “They’re essentially asking us to confirm that effect by designing an experiment where you play a movie, but transition from the beginning to the end — and in the middle, there’s a context that changes slowly.”
How does the brain track moving objects? Researchers from the University of Freiburg and the Technical University of Berlin will track how mouse brains process visual data to perceive motion. “They’re interested in how the circuits deal with conflictual motion,” Lecoq says. “If something is going very fast toward you, you’re probably going to notice it immediately, because it’s going at a different speed than the rest of your vision. And this is incredibly important when you want to avoid, like, a tiger jumping onto you that is in the corner of your field of view.”
How do we recognize textures by sight alone? Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary will use the Allen Brain Observatory to study the role played by the visual cortex in interpreting the look of different textures. The experiment could shed light on how we use visual cues to distinguish between subcategories of objects — for example, different varieties of apples, or different breeds of dogs. “That’s what this project is about,” Lecoq says. “How does the brain disentangle representations of objects as we learn?”
Six years after OpenScope opened for business, Lecoq says the program reflects a new model for neuroscience: “Our platform enhances data acquisition and global sharing, while empowering individual labs to leverage it for their unique scientific pursuits,” he says.
That’s how OpenScope is following through on the open-science approach that Paul Allen championed more than a decade ago. “This is our vision for the future of neuroscience,” Lecoq says.
Jerome Lecoq co-leads of the OpenScope program alongside Christof Koch, a fellow neuroscientist at the Allen Institute. Koch was a featured guest on the Fiction Science podcast in 2021, talking about his psychedelic experience and what such experiences can teach us about the nature of consciousness. If you haven’t listened to that podcast already, check it out.
Take a look at the original version of this item on Cosmic Log for bonus reading recommendations from Jerome Lecoq, and stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.
https://ift.tt/4qDfXM7 July 28, 2024 at 04:12PM GeekWire
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