It. And you hear the shape and the musicality and its its a ridiculous thing about the cinema but its more interesting than the faces. Ive known lots of people who its just listening. And you can hear when its right. Rose we conclude with Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of reddit. His new book is called without their permission. And while the internet and this technology is not a magic wand, what it does enable is you or toy say to someone with a straight face if you have an Internet Connection and a laptop you can build something from a little apartment that eight years later can have more traffic than the New York Times. In the case of reddit. Rose brine science, stephen fears are and social media when we continue. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Weve been using mepl rye machines for the last ten to 20 years to try to look at brain function and brain connectivity. I look at how the brain works together to produce behavior and thats the most simple way to think about the connector. Rose in our charlie rose brain series we have explored our magnificent human brain through two remarkable series with my cohost dr. Eric kandel we have brought together many of the worlds best scientists and researchers on Brain Science. We continue this project a looking at researchers from wa wavr university and st. Louis. James gorman writes about the New York Times about the teams work to develop the first wiring diagram of the living human brain. This data could help us answer this important question. How do differences in brain wiring relate to differences in our behaviors, our thoughts, our emotions, and our experiences. Research is part of the human connectom project an effort supported by the National Institutes of health. James gorman joins me and with me on this journey to help understand this research and its potential impact is eric kandel, dr. Eric kandel. So i am pleased. I mean, with great excitement i read this and called him up like were back in the saddle again laughter Brain Science is alive rose you gave us a great moment. Tell me about what led you to this because not only did you write but you were the a guinea pig. Weve been thinking that we covered a vances, news stories and neuroscience often but we have been thinking as many people have, as you have that we ought to do it in a little more systematic way and so a while ago my editor asked me to start looking not so much into treatment and some of the sort of applied research but into the nittygritty. How neurons connect, whats going on in basic Brain Science. Its thoofbs a huge the technology is changing, the money is flowing into it. Theres a lot of xhiplt and around the same time that we were getting going president obama announced an initiative, a grand challenge so we thought how are the ways were going to look at this . And one of the big challenges is that trying to cope with neuroscience is like rose tell me about it. It feels bigger than universe. So all we could do is do a sampling of some of the projects and we thought lets start out with mapping. Its not its not everything but it serves as kind of a foundation. Lets talk to some of the people trying to map the brain in different ways. And the question was whether we were going to start at the level of the electron microscope very small or the level of the whole human brain and thats something people relate to immediately because they have one. Rose so we know about the mapping, eric, of the human genome. Now we talk about the mapping. Give me your sense as a neuroscientist of the significance of the things that he reported on. I think the difference of this is several fold. One is we want to understand how the human brain works and the key to understanding is that is how the different components interact. Many people have been looking at this from a variety of perspectives through imaging studies. This particular study moves it forward in the following way one is it is very systematic. It doesnt take the three of us, it takes 1,200 odd people, number one. Number two, these are people from normal walks of life. Men, women, baseball players, academics. Rose who have their brains skand. Who have their brains scanned and deena is going about this in a very systematic way. She wants, as jim pointed out in this article today, to work out in general the connectivity of the brain and shes doing this by doing four studies. Someone she just wants to see functional imaging to see what areas of the brain are active. She wants to see how areas interact and shes got two ways of approaching it one in a resting state to see what areas are active together. Then she has a way of actually tracing connections. Connectomics which she calls the pathways, the white matter in the brain. And finally and critically important shes going to combine these three imaging approaches with behavioral studies. Shes going to see what happens when you learn something. When you sing a song. When people interact socially. So shes going to get a variety of different perspectives on this. So what is unique is not that any component of it is you but that its systematic and thats one of the purposes. Rose by the end of this it will be available online. Already much of it is available online. And they have a webbased program called workbench, any scientist in the world can go in there and essentially query the database and look for connections between different activities in the brain or different qualities that people have. I thinks another very nice thing about this. Its a wonderful environment in which shes going to work. One of the pioneers brain imaging, david holz man an outstanding neurologist that we have, david van essen, its a wonderful environment in which to work, lots of interesting people to talk with and work with so this is going to be a thought through and reliable set of studies. And she would be the first to point out shes one person working on one part of this. She comes from psychology. Rose she comes from psychology. So many people involved. Rose interesting, the psychology, because there is this sort of series of questions too. You went through this. Yes. Rose tell me what it was like. Well, the m. R. I. , as anyone knows whos gone through one is very noisy and confining and most people have are able to cope with the fear because theyre there for some sort of diagnosis. That was one thing. The tests you do in the m. R. I. , theres a variety of them. Some are as simple as curling your toes to map where your toes are. Others require a kind of memory activity that made me convinced that i had completely lost my mind. Are laughs rose really. Asking what you remembered about well, you see a series of pictures and you try to remember whether the one you saw two times ago or oneq9q or however this was two times ago is the same as the one youre seeing now. So you see it typed and then you see a tree, then a car, and then you have to push, is that the same as the one no, its not the same. Then the pipe, well, yes. No, thats not pretty soon youre so its very hard to do. And of the fascinating thing she is said to me afterwards, i said i was working so hard on that. She said thats one of the things that this might show because youre going to have your emotional your emotions are tied up in competing in this test. Thats not going to be true for everyone. Some people are going to be very different. Theyre not going to theyre going to take it much more easily. Rose you write neuroscience does not have a baseline database for structure and activity. Structure and activity in a healthy brain that can be cross referenced with personality traits, cognitive skills and genetics. Dont have it. Exactly right. We dont have that. Rose and how important is it to have that . It would be marvelous to have but this is not around the corner. Rose its within the next ten years . We talked about this once before. My feeling is a complete understanding of the human brain were speaking more like many decades. Helen mayberg who we had here and you mentioned very prominent in this thick, shes done wonderful imaging on depressed people and delineate it had beginnings of the neural circuit of that. If you look at psychiatry, for example, there is no area, to disorder that is really understood on this level. Schizophrenia, autism, were just beginning to understand which areas we have not been able toll do this before because we did not have the tools to do it like we do now . The imaging tools . Or is it some new theory of theres no new theory. The imaging tools when they came along were noisy and not completely reliable and it took a long time to really work out the difficulties with it. Theyre now much more reliable and this is a very Reliable Group of investigators, number one. Number two, you need resources. You need huge resources to carry out these largescale studies. Three, the problem is extremely difficult. Shes not asking herself what is the cause of schizophrenia, which would be a very difficult problem to tackle right on. Shes asking herself how does the brain function in very general terms . How did people handle the same task in somewhat different ways . Rose explain this to me because youve said in your piece the central question is how do differences between you and me and how our brains are wired up relate to differences in our behavior, our feelings and our emotions . Ive said this in the introduction. Well, one of the things that i did for instance which haul the volunteers go through is you fill out a questionnaire. And interestingly, the person the Research Assistant whos there leaves the room because its private. How often do you feel sad . You know, have you do you feel discouraged . So its trying to get at and these are very traditional wellused psychological tests that many people have used over the years so they can tie them what that says about your state of mind. So if you have 1,200 people and you have data on how they take these tests, you may be able to see what the variations are that correspond to the variations that show up on the test. But maybe not. But you may be able to see something closer than what you have before and that may begin to give you an idea. The other thing is that youre not just looking at a difference in size of struck dhur, you are looking at what happens when people are doing something, which parts of the brain patterns and connectivety. Rose explain that. Ill give you a simple example. This would not apply to new york cab drivers who get lost all the time. But in london you have to pass an examination. Rose youve actually said this before, but go ahead. If you look at the brains of london cab drivers, their hippocampus the part of the brain concerned for memory gets larger the more they drive and when they stop driving it shrinks a bit. So this is wonderful. But we dont know what other areas that this region interconnects with and these are the kinds of things we can find out. We know individual cases if you just oppose your finger miss, many times or if you play the violin the representation of the left hand, the fingering, is much larger than for people who dont play the violin. In the motor area. So we know in very primitive ways that different body functions are represented in the brain and they change with experience. But a systematic rose and use. Yes. And they shrink. And, of course, we know with certain disease states that certain areas involved and not overs but a systematic study of normal behavioral patterns, this is a wonderful beginning. This is not the end. This is a systematic beginning. Rose but its a heck of a beginning and a lot of great universities. Theres one program thats got mass general and harvard rose theyre involved with u. C. L. A. Oxford is involved with minnesota and somebody else. And washington university. Its a very serious program. Rose and you just got 200, 300 million to do what . laughs rose Mort Zuckerman gave columbia 200 million for mind Behavior Initiative. Rose whats that . We want to tackle problems of the brain on a variety of levels. We want to understand how the brain works in simple animals as well as cognates. We want to understand the disease states. We want to understand how mental functions have an impact on other aspects of society. For example, how do people respond to work . What is it about music that really moves you in such a way . So to use the mind Behavior Initiative to interact with other components of the university. Rose so to understand what makes us human, isnt it . Thats right. Thats right. Rose they also are involved in i mean, i assume part of this is not the mapping thing but maybe it is, also, its the connection between neurons, right . Yes. Theyre not looking in this at this level with the m. R. I. , the connections between neurons, theyre looking at the connections between regions and information flow and the direction of information flow in the brain. There areor people in are looking at the connections between neurons more in mice and fruit flies in fruit flies. Jerry rubin is doing a parallel thing at the Howard Hughes medical institute in which he similar matally is mapping the brain of the fruit fly using genetic and anatomical technique and will be applicable to higher animals as well. So what we talked about the last time which is rose the initiative. This is what youre seeing in action. People are doing things they did before more systematically, more collaboratively in order to push this problem forward. Rose and are they getting more money . No. Rose really. No. The money is embarrassing. Rose you mean in terms of talking about money from n. I. H. Or money from 100 million a year at the moment is set aside for the brain initiative. Thats not even enough to pay for dinners for the three of us rose it doesnt seem to be new money. But the point is well taken. A hundred Million Dollars seems like when you think about rose n. I. H. s budget for neuroscience apart from that is 5. 5 billion. Rose part of this is coming out of preexisting funding. And what makes it crazy when you think about that is because it is about understanding a whole range of disease. Its an enormous rose that affects so many millions of peoples lives. Whether its depression or rose Francis Collins would tell you the head of the small amount of money at the very beginning of the human genome project and it served as kind of a smart to develop the techniques and seed money. So thats the hope. You know, well see. In europe theyve put one billion dollars rose i know out for a project that is at least the people ive talked to not as well regarded as the plan that n. I. H. Has come up with. Rose a lot of focus similar peer cal. Rose focused on them trying to see whether you can simulate the human brain in a computer. Rose what do you think of that . Since we know so little about how the brain works it will be hard to simulate it. But there are other people joining in. Rose is there a complete sharing of information across the board . What youre doing and what helen is doing . Thats not a problem. The problem at the moment is resources. The resources are grossly inadequate for the job. I think everyone would admit that whos involved in it. Rose whats interesting about this is three dimensional, too, and interactive. Oh, yeah. Rose explain why thats important. Well, it just it makes it so complicated that you need new kinds of mathematical tools and software, algorithms to understand. At harvard theyre working to connect the and map the neurons and Jeff Lichtman who works there is fond of saying the smallest volume that we can see with the electron microscope in the nano meter range and the volume you see in the functional m. R. I. Which is what theyre doing, theres a trillion one is a trillion times bigger than other. And the one thats the trillion times bigger is i may get my numbers wrong but its one thousandths of a cubic inch. Then you have the whole brain and at every level in between there are important interactions going on at that level and between levels. This is why its very important and why this is happening to do the human brain in parallel with the worm, with the fly and with the mouse. Because they can give you solutions to the rose simpler solutions. Much simpler but they have in many cases very parallel behaviors. And you can explore them ways that you cant explore the human brain so you can take a fly ose we should also point out that this is not the only methodology thats come along recently. We haveoptigenetics. Rose whats that . Its a way of inserting a gene into a cell so it will respond to light. So you can turn on any combination of cells that you want and cut shells cells off. So you can use it in intact behaving animals and its revolutionized the field. Rose has all of this attention perhaps not money, but attention from my Little Television series where you to the New York Times doing all this stuff, has it spurred enormous interest in young physicians, both medical and researchers to become neuroscientists . You cannot imagine. My wife showed me recently a graph of the evolution of graduate education in the united states. For all disciplines its like this. For neuroscience its like that. It just keeps on increasing. Just keeps on increasing. The problem is that with the cutback for funding for basic research this is discouraging people from going into science. And young people are having a more difficult time, talented young people having more difficult time getting a job than they did before. When i came along, if you could read and write you got a grant. laughter now its a. M. A. Jor accomplishment. laughter rose well, you could read and write, couldnt you . laughter one of the problems with grants is that the political need is to say were going to cure a disease that hurts you and the level of the science is to say well, id like to know how this neuron in a fly detects motion from left to right. You know . Terrific rose yeah, yeah, exactly. This is very exciting stuff and were learning things and theres a lot going on in a variety of different places and yet some of it has enormous connections to it. Its about some basic questions that are referred to. And its going to bring in other sciences, as you mentioned engineering, mathematicians, chemists are going to come into the field, nanotechnologists because their help is needed and they find their problems interesting. Not to speak of genomistists. Rose but it also reminds me the vastness of what we dont know and the extraordinary quality of this brain is really amazing. And you have to always ask yourself dont get ahead of yourself because this is hard work. Yes, it is. Rose it is step b