Is a Revolutionary Approach to Neuroscience on the Horizon?

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In this week’s edition of the journal Nature, an international trio of neuroscientists published a comment outlining a radical proposal for kickstarting a new “bottom-up” and collaborative “big science” approach to brain research. The neuroscientists consider international collaboration between theorists and experimentalists from multiple institutions—working together—to be a critical next step towards solving the enigmatic mysteries of the human brain.

Recently, there has been a groundswell of neuroscientists declaring that in order to crack the code of the human brain, they need to enter an era of “big science” driven by collaborative research that mirrors the “brain observatories” used in astronomy or the CERN teams working together in physics.

In October 2015, six neuroscientists published an opinion letter in the journal Neuron calling for “A National Network of Neurotechnology Centers for the BRAIN Initiative.” I reported on this opinion letter in a Psychology Today blog post, "How Could "Brain Observatories" Help the BRAIN Initiative?"

Last year's call to action by six neuroscientists in Neuron echoes the comment published this week in Nature by Zachary Mainen, director of research at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon, Portugal; Michael Häusser, professor of Neuroscience at University College London, United Kingdom; and Alexandre Pouget, professor of neuroscience at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Neuroscience Is a Competitive Field That Would Benefit From Collaboration

In a news statement released today, the neuroscientists acknowledge that the harsh competitiveness of their field is not "fertile ground" for this type of "deep" collaborative effort. But, the authors of the latest call to action are practicing what they preach. In their statement, Zach Mainen said, "We have a group of 20 researchers (10 theorists and 10 experimentalists), about half in the US and half in the UK, Switzerland and Portugal."

As a twentieth-century neuroscientist and neurosurgeon, my father, Richard Bergland, was a trailblazer who was ahead of his time. Although he spent much of his career as a neurosurgeon at Harvard Medical School, my dad would take a research sabbatical every seven years. On various sabbaticals, he collaborated with scientists overseas at places such as Oxford University in the UK and the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia. My father always put a premium on international collaboration.

As an iconoclast, my dad strived to break down institutionalized barriers to advance neuroscience. He loved merging the unique insights he gained by operating on human patients as a brain surgeon with neuroscientific research he conducted on animals in a laboratory to form groundbreaking hypotheses. Unfortunately, the complex politics of international academia created a variety of hurdles and roadblocks that challenged my father’s equanimity and diplomacy skills.

Over the years, he grew frustrated by colleagues in the ivory towers of academia who wanted to maintain the status quo. That being said, I agree with Mainen et al. that the time is ripe for research teams from different laboratories, in different countries, to join efforts and create earth-shattering types of collaborative research that could usher neuroscience into a new era. In their statement, Zach Mainen said,

“By collaboration, we don't mean business as usual; we really mean it. We'll have 10 labs doing the same experiments, with the same gear, the same computer programs. The data we will obtain will go into the cloud and be shared by the 20 labs. It'll be almost as a global lab, except it will be distributed geographically."

Some of the questions that Mainen's team want to tackle include: “How does the brain function, from molecules to cells to circuits to brain systems to behavior? How are all these levels of complexity integrated to ultimately allow consciousness to emerge in the human brain?” To help neuroscience make a quantum leap and solve these brain riddles—Mainen, Häusser, and Pouget propose specific actionable advice in their Nature comment based on six principles:

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• Focus on a single brain function
• Combine experimentalists and theorists
• Share data
• Assign credit in new ways
• Standardize tools and methods
• Engender a sphere of trust in which it is safe to share data, resources, and plans.

This framework was inspired by the ATLAS experiment at the European Laboratory of Nuclear Research (CERN). In 2013, CERN had 2,513 staff members and involved 12,313 fellows, associates, apprentices as well as visiting scientists and engineers from 608 different universities. The physicists collaborated on huge accelerator experiments to discover new subatomic particles (such as Higgs boson) that could ultimately lead to a better understanding of the evolution of our Universe.

Although the size of the teams involved in collaborative neuroscience probably wouldn't be on the scale as the CERN teams, the collaborative principles should be very similar, according to Mainen. He said, "What we propose is very much in the physics style, a kind of 'Grand Unified Theory' of brain research. Can we do it? Clearly, it's not going to happen within five years, but we do have theories that need to be tested, and the underlying principles of how to do it will be much the same as in physics."

Hopefully, the clarion call of neuroscientists around the world advocating for more international collaboration will lead to a revolutionary era of brain research in the twenty-first century. Stay tuned to see how the latest groundswell to create a "Grand Unified Theory" of brain research unfolds.