 Okay, so I'm here today to tell you about an exciting frontier at the intersection of neuroscience and computer science Now I suspect that when many of you think about neuroscience the first things that come to mind are Medical applications mental disorders pharmaceuticals, but what I'm going to try and argue today is that the stakes are much greater in the year 2015 so neuroscience is the study of the brain as a mechanism and throughout history We've sought to rationalize and understand the brain in the mind in terms of our current technology So in the era of Descartes we used hydraulic analogies animating fluids that would move the body in the era of Freud esteem Pressure building up in the psyche in the area of radio We started to talk about channels and communication now in the era of the computer were surrounded by computers So it's natural for us to use the metaphor of the computer So we talk about networks in the brain We talk about computations performed by neuronal circuits But the difference is that this isn't just a metaphor and that's because computer science Gives us formal mathematical tools for reasoning about information processing systems So we have in computer science a key notion of an algorithm a separation of the algorithm Which is what you're computing from the implementation, which is how you're computing it So the same equivalence that lets us write code for a supercomputer and for a cell phone Also lets us contemplate writing software for very different kinds of hardware in particular biological hardware and seeing through this lens The brain is a amazingly fascinating and complex computer So there's on the order of a hundred billion neurons in the brain and on the order of a hundred trillion connections in between them called Synapses and the amazing thing about the brain is it can do all kinds of things that computers for all of their sophistication are bad at But the problem isn't that we lack the computational power Increasingly we have enormous computational resources available to us on this planet The NSA has a zettabyte of storage in Utah Google has countless data centers that crunch millions of hours of video every day Sheer computational power isn't the problem. The problem is that we don't know the algorithms We don't know the software of the brain, but it turns out that already Labs around the world including my own lab have started building algorithms that are inspired by the brain It turns out these are tremendously economically valuable even though they're very primitive So private industry in the last two years alone has poured billions of dollars into studying biologically inspired Computing but we're very far from actually still matching the power of the brain and to go that next step What I argue is that we need to actually go back to the brain and Reverse engineer the brain to figure out those pieces of those algorithms of that software and that hardware that we're missing So we have to study the natural system and then build artificial systems that work the same way and it turns out that in 2015 there's never been a better time to study the brain So we have advanced electrophysiological tools. So this is basically wire-tapping the brain So driven by silicon micro machining and nano fabrication technologies We can now put hundreds to thousands of electrodes in the brain literally wire-tapping the activity of cells And then there's also been a renaissance in imaging so we can insert genes for fluorescent proteins that make neurons glow when they're active and this lets us literally watch a thought In a living brain. So right now you're watching Over on the right a rat experiencing a three-dimensional object and you can see the cells lighting up in real time Likewise, we also now have genetic tools for manipulating not just recording But manipulating the activity of circuits in the brain so we can perturb them and see how they work so this is a picture was taken by Feng Zhang a colleague at MIT and Basically what this lets you do is you shine light on the cells and they either turn on or turn off so literally we control neural circuits at the flip of a light switch and then more recently and and sort of on the cutting edge and More speculative cutting edge We also have this new technology or new frontier called connectomics where we can thinly slice the brain and then Actually trace out the wiring diagram across many many slices So this was an image created by a colleague down the hall from me Jeff Lickman at Harvard And what this lets us do this is just one small piece of the brain that's been reconstructed But you could imagine that this wiring that the entire wiring diagram is an enormous enormous corpus of data So we can now begin to contemplate having the function of the brain the behavior being able to perturb its activity And then also having the wire diagram now the stakes of this can't be underestimated So one obvious thing is that there are many disorders diseases that we can contemplate approaching once we understand the software of the brain So many diseases don't have a genetic or anatomical smoking gun They seem to be errors in the software of the brain and if we understand the software of the brain We can start to think about how we might start to correct some of these problems But even beyond that we can imagine a world where if we can recreate the abilities of the brain We can start having machines do things for us. So drive our cars We can have machines that can diagnose our medical images. We can have machines that free us from labor You think about many of the jobs in the world that basically require a working brain These are things that we can start to replace and augment with machines now This is going to be an enormous multidisciplinary effort. It's going to take Biologists computer scientists neuroscientists chemists. It will also take ethicists It will take policy makers for us to really navigate this new frontier of possibilities That neuroscience computer science make possible. Thank you