Why Understanding the Brain is Important?

The development of any society or the growth of any nation depends a lot on the behavior of the people residing in it. In the history, we have seen the result of any war depends a lot on the intelligence of the king and his governing body. One of the factors on which intelligence depends is the proper functioning of the brain. The intelligence of the human brain enables humans to sit at the top of the animal kingdom. Human brain is good so far it is utilized for the benefits of the society. Many a times we do not come to know, when we our liking for a thing or activity becomes addiction like usage of mobile phones in the current times.

In the current society too, we see a race among humans to prove oneself superior than the others in terms of finance or other materialistic things. During the course of evolution, brain as a system has constantly evolved to meet the changing demands of its surroundings or society. Moreover, understanding who we are and where we have come from, has always fascinated human beings. The beauty lies not only how in understanding How brain has evolved but also in understanding Why it has evolved? It is important because it is the main organ which in conjunction with the skeletal system provides, to animals and to us, an ability to run away from dangers (to escape) and also to move from one place to another in search of food.

Thus, it is very important to understand brain evolution to understand human evolution. To perform all these tasks the evolving brain should have a unique architecture. Brain as a tissue consists of cells known as neurons or neuronal cells. These cells have a tree like architecture with an axon (like the stem of a tree), dendrites (like branches of a tree) and synaptic connections (like roots). Neurons communicate via electrical and chemical messages with one another to transfer information rapidly. The great computational power of brain lies in the layered architecture of human brain cortex.

In recent times, there is a growing interest in understanding the evolution of the laminar (layered) architecture of humans as well as the animal brain cortex. This understanding will not only help in adding basic knowledge of the neural networks operating at the cortical level but also it will help to develop newer computers with better capabilities of performing logical operations. Brain working in conjunction with other sensory systems endows human beings and animals with an ability to appreciate the beauty around them. Thus, there is a growing interest to understand neurophysiology (functioning of the brain) as well.

Like any other tissue of the human body, brain function can be deranged due to ‘performance pressure’ at work place or emotional stress, lack of sleep in children in recent times and people doing night shifts in Multi-national companies. It can also be affected due to attack of neurons by viruses, bacteria or metabolism defects leading to different neurological and psychiatric disorders depending upon the brain area affected. It also gets altered in addictions like drinking alcohol, cigarette smoking, substances containing high concentrations of caffeine etc.

Thus, understanding the factors which deranges the brain function and the ones which bring it to normal levels is also very important. In recent trends, there is a growing interest to develop newer therapies for brain recreation and to get scientific understanding of how existing therapies such as music therapy or other recreational activities help to calm down brain. Also, there is a growing interest in understanding brain function for the development of newer teaching methods. But apart from these good things sometimes, the brain is utilized for performing illegal/criminal activities.

In epileptic attacks, there is hyperactivity of the brain leading to abnormal discharges during the attack and brain function is assessed with electroencephalography (EEG) at the clinical level. EEG can only be performed in a clinic or a hospital but mostly when EEG discharges happen, the patient is at home or at work place. Thus, continuous effort is being done by the neuroscientists, engineers, chemists, fashion industry etc. to develop a suit/dress which can be worn by the patient all the time like a smart watch and it will record his/her EEG at all the times of a day.

In this EEG-suit, the wires will be embedded in the suit fabric to record the electrical activity and it will be connected to the brain via a cap such as EEG cap which will record brain electrical activity. If it will be successful, a lot of epilepsy EEG data will be available for the better understanding of this disorder. It would also help in understanding what conditions evokes epileptic disorders.

Furthermore, formation of alpha synuclein, a cytosolic protein, aggregates in Parkinson’s disease and amyloid beta protein aggregates in Alzheimer’s disease is evident. The numbers of proteins present in a neuron as in any other eukaryotic cell is much higher than the number of genes. This is achieved by the alternative splicing of the mRNA and the post translational modifications (PTMs) of proteins.

PTMs of proteins are important for regulating their activity, their distribution with in a cell or their cellular localization, proper folding of the proteins. No or abnormal PTMs has been reported to lead to many neurodegenerative disorders. Also, recently intrinsic disorder of proteins (IDPs) has been reported to be important for the proper folding and interaction with other protein partners (protein-protein interaction networks, PPINs) in multi-protein machineries where many proteins work cooperatively to carry out a particular function such as electron transport chain (ETC).

The development of newer computational tools which are based on machine learning and artificial intelligence such as Alpha fold (for the prediction of tertiary structure of proteins by Deep Mind Technologies Ltd.) and STRING and Cytoscape softwares for the prediction of PPI networks prediction are some of the recent trends and achievements of the scientific community in the field of computational neuroscience and bioinformatics to understand the connections between how mutations in the different genes in the neuronal cells results in different neuro-pathologies.

Keep all the above points in view it can be easily understood, how important it is to study brain functioning for the development of any society or nation. Currently neuroscience is attracting the students as well as the scientists from most of the disciplines, such as, mathematics, social sciences, computer science, engineering, physics, chemistry, medicine, biotechnology, pharmacy, de-addiction, fashion, education, language, economics, forensic science, music, sports, law etc., there is a room for every discipline.

Written By:
Dr. Rajeev Gupta
Assistant Professor
BNPT, FAHS