As far as we know the human brain is the most complex structure in the universe.
That’s what Cincinnati Children’s neuroscientist Steve Danzer, PhD, tells his students at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine (UC), where he’s an associate professor of Anesthesiology. However, while the brain’s complexity makes the jobs of these future doctors and scientists more difficult, the brain’s ability to restructure and rewire itself creates opportunities for developing entirely new therapies.
About the size of two clenched fists, this oblong globe of tissue fits 200 billion electrically sensitive neurons and glia cells and more than 100 trillion synapses into our heads. The components all work together inside that relatively small space to help make us what and who we are. It controls the function of our organs and limbs, is capable of logic, reason, love, hate and fear and can burst forth with brilliant creativity.
Danzer’s challenge—and that of his colleagues in the Center for Pediatric Neuroscience—is to figure out more about how it works and why. Scientists and physicians see great potential to use the brain’s abilities to improve medicine and human health. To some extent medicine already does this, but there is still far more about the brain that we don’t know than we do.
“Neurology and neuroscience affect almost everything,” says Danzer, center director and a neuroscientist in the Department of Anesthesia. “We know the brain has tremendous adaptive capabilities—like restructuring itself to recover the ability to walk or speak after stroke—but these endogenous processes often are insufficient. We need to learn more about how the brain repairs itself so that we can help these processes to work better, and prevent them from going wrong and producing pathological outcomes, like chronic pain.
That journey is still relatively early, according to Danzer. A lot more foundational science work is needed.
“We are getting a good understanding of how neurons and individual cells work and how neural networks work,” Danzer explains. “Our hope is that we get to a point where we can understand the bigger questions about behavior, emotion and consciousness. We’re not there yet and the answers are still kind of wide open.”