A Conversation with Mehmet Fatih Yanik.

Abstract

Dr. Yanik: My background is in engineering, computer science, and physics. One of the things that always surprised me is how we treat the brain. It is probably the most sophisticated machine we know in the universe. It is more complex than our supercomputer networks, yet when we treat brain disorders, we basically perfuse the entire brain with chemicals expecting magic to happen. And magic sometimes happens, but more often it does not. Yes, people know about the involvement of complex network dysfunctions in brain disorders and have “proposals” for treating them. Yet, there has been no demonstration for fixing brain-wide dysfunctions. My inclination was that, at least in simple animal models, we should be able to look into these circuits at a very high resolution, at a single-cell resolution over the entire brain, and test whether we can indeed fix their brain-wide network dysfunctions just like we fix man-made artificial circuits.