 You are special and you and so are you all because you possess the world's most powerful supercomputer comprised of 86 billion neurons, your brains. But isn't it amazing that our brains helped us to crack the genetic code? They have helped us to fly to the moon and yet we don't understand how they work. I want to understand how these 86 billion make us who we are by studying four of them. Now how can four neurons get us anywhere? So in neuroscience we have powerful methods to study the activity of single neurons at the highest detail and we can study large networks of thousands and millions of neurons but the larger the networks the lower our resolution and this has led to a problem. We are struggling to explain the activity of the networks based on what we know about the single neurons because neural networks are more than the sum of their parts. They are like a good football team. You can't explain the success of a football team only by the individual players because there are interactions and there is synchronous activity and these emergent properties are crucial for the success of a team and neural network activity. But to quantify these emergent properties and networks we need to study the team of neurons at the highest physiological detail and here our methods currently limit us to single neurons or maximum two cells and these don't capture the interactions but four would change everything and I'm not the only one who thinks so. If we could measure four neurons at this high detail we could understand how the interactions and synchronous activity contribute to the network performance and to achieve this I want to use the patch clamp technique. It provides this high detail and we routinely use it in the lab to study single neurons. I want to quadruple our equipment and target four neurons at the same time and not in any brain tissue but the most accessible and best characterized there is the retina in the eye. So my vision is to establish the world's first four cell patch clamp recordings to help understand the 86 billion that drive our every thought and action by quantifying emergent properties in small networks that are the building blocks of the brain. Thank you. So I know I have many many questions about the brain but we've only got time for two so let's pass it over to our judges. If you were now thinking what would be the first answer you were looking for by assuming that you will manage to develop this what would be the first thing you will be looking for. Yes because as you see we're developing a technique so we can apply to many different things but the first thing I want to look at is synchronous activity networks because we know that in the brain and the retina neurons respond in synchrony part of the time. We know this can be good or bad depending on the network state but we actually don't know how it translates to networks. It has only been measured in pairs of neurons and they only have one connection so we have no idea how this translates to larger networks and I for the first time can measure it in four neurons that have six connections so we can see how it actually translates to larger or small but larger networks than one connection. Just another quick one how far you are in developing this. Yes so you have to imagine this whole patch clamp technique a bit like juggling. Every ball you add every neuron you add makes matters exponentially more complicated but what I have done in the last half a year I have got reliable two neuron recordings and like in juggling I will add one ball at a time and add neuron three and four in the next couple of years to come. Perfect. Well thank you very much for the questions from the judges. Thank you very much Anna.