Watching Sleeping Neurons: Audrey Chen at TEDxYouth@Caltech

Dr. Audrey Chen is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Division of Biology at Caltech, and whose current work examines the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying sleep. In her talk, she shows us neural activity in a live brain, that's housed in a 'glass box'. Dr. Chen is passionate about making science accessible to everyone, and invites us to consider the possibilities that crowd-sourced science might hold.

Wow! That was great!

My name is Audrey
and I'm a neuroscientist at Caltech.

And I want to tell you
about what I work on here at Caltech.

So, what I work on in my lab

is, we actually study sleep.

Let me ask you a question:

If you want to study the brain,

do you want to look at it

where it's kind of enclosed

in a skull you can't see through?

Or do you want to see it
in a transparent box?

I think it's a transparent box!

So, one thing that's really good

is that we actually have this
already in nature.

We have a brain in a glass box.

We have something where we can see

straight through an organism
and see their brain.

What we can do
is zoom in on their brain

and look at these neurons.

What I'm showing you here
are neurons,

and each one of them
is a different color.

They're neurons in Technicolor.

These neurons are hypocretin neurons.

Does anyone know anybody with narcolepsy?

Have you guys heard of narcolepsy?

Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder

where you're always kind of sleepy,

and when you get stimuli that excite you,

or something that is,
I guess, your brain food,

instead of being excited,

which is kind of the normal thing to do,

you actually fall asleep.

These neurons I'm showing you here

are the neurons
that are involved in that.

So, when we have all these neurons
in different colors in the brain,

the important thing is:

How do they connect with one another?

You have all these tracks--

how many of you guys here
have taken public transportation?

When you have public transportation,

what's important is
where those points of contact are,

and where all those
different tracks lead.

And so, similar to that,

we are constructing a system map.

One of the ways
we want to do this,

is to take cues from how
we interact with other humans.

When we have another human,

one thing that we do
is give a handshake.

So what professor Cori Bargmann did

is that she designed a way
to do a molecular grasp.

So for example, I'm neuron Audrey,

this is neuron Ella,

and we each have a glove
that's not lighting up.

But when we make contact,

we actually have our gloves lighting up.

And when we are further away,

the lights go off.

So, this is a way to figure out

how those neurons
are connecting to one other,

and we can actually see...

(Audience laughs at off-camera event)

[Cori and her friends
Molecular Grasp]

...we see when the neurons
are talking to each other,

when they're close enough
to one other,

and when they're further apart
from each other.

I want to talk about
my motivation to study science.

I want to study science

because I like to test ideas
and observe what happens.

What we want to do is make sure
we're making a fair comparison.

When we have an apple,
we want to compare it to an apple.

When you make a comparison,
you want to make sure

you're comparing
an orange to an orange.

So in controlled conditions,
we have lots of different controls.

We have positive controls
and negative controls;

you have positive controls
to make sure

when you're actually testing something,
you can see an effect.

You have negative controls
to make sure you don't have auto-activation,

so that when you don't have introduction

of the experimental condition
or stimuli you're testing,

it's not going to just go off.

And then you have
your experimental condition.

And when you design
an experiment,

you have lots of positive controls,

you have lots of negative controls,

and you have your experimental condition.

One trend that we're seeing
in neuroscience

is that we can observe
and test our idea.

And what we scientists are,

is we're kind of like little ninjas,

just quietly looking at the brain.

And that's what
Alex and his friends have done.

What they do is take these brains
that are in glass boxes,

and the brains are
swimming, or sleeping,

or doing whatever they want,

and the team, meanwhile,
captures the neural activity.

The way they do this

is that they've
genetically engineered

each of these neurons
to give off a photon of light,

and the more active
these brains are,

the more photons come out,

so you see a greater luminescence.

And so, while these fish
are doing their regular business,

while these brains in glass boxes
are doing their regular business,

and we can observe the neural activity.

Let's say we want to take this
a little bit further,

to the entire human population.

What if we look at
the entire human population,

in your native environment,

and let's say we take away
those positive and negative controls

and just have experimental conditions?

What if we have something
like a wiki log,

a wiki lab notebook,

where everyone contributes their ideas,

and as people are contributing,
everyone writes over one another,

kind of like Wikipedia.
Who would have thought

that WIkipedia would have
taken off the way it did,

with all its success?
But it did.

And what if we could
apply it to science?

It's slightly different than
how we think about things now.

We have these apples and oranges,

and usually we can't compare
them to one another.

But now we have
all these different conditions,

and things like maybe weird fruits,

like dragon fruit,

and we want to compare those.

So, I want to give you a challenge:

to be the ones,
to be the mathematicians

and the statisticians to design

these types of algorithms;

and to decide whether or not

we can extrapolate trends

and figure out the observations
without all those controls.

So, change the way we do science.
Go change the world.

Thanks!

(Applause)