So there you are, surrounded by some of the smartest neuroscientists (and associated engineers, biologists, physicists, economists and lawyers) in the world, and you ask them to dream their biggest dreams. What could they achieve if money and time were no object?
That's the question William Newsome, PhD, asked last year when he became director of the new Stanford Neurosciences Institute. The result is what he calls the Big Ideas in Neuroscience. Today the institute announced seven Big Ideas that will become a focus for the institute, each of which includes faculty from across Stanford schools and departments.
In my story about the Big Ideas, I quote Newsome:
The Big Ideas program scales up Stanford's excellence in interdisciplinary collaboration and has resulted in genuinely new collaborations among faculty who in many cases didn't even know each other prior to this process. I was extremely pleased with the energy and creativity that bubbled up from faculty during the Big Ideas proposal process. Now we want to empower these new teams to do breakthrough research at important interdisciplinary boundaries that are critical to neuroscience.
The Big Ideas are all pretty cool, but I find a few to be particularly fascinating.
One that I focus on in my story is a broad collaboration intended to extend what people like psychiatrist Robert Malenka, MD, PhD, and psychologist Brian Knutson, PhD, are learning about how the brain makes choices to improve policies for addiction and economics. Keith Humphreys, PhD, a psychiatry professor who has worked in addiction policy and is a frequent contributor to this blog, is working with this group to help them translate their basic research into policy.
Another group led by bioengineer Kwabena Boahen, PhD, and ophthalmologist E.J. Chichilnisky, PhD, are working to develop smarter prosthetics that interface with the brain. I spoke with Chichilnisky today, and he said his work develop a prosthetic retina is just the beginning. He envisions a world where we as people interface much more readily with machines.
Other groups are teaming up to take on stroke, degenerative diseases, and mental health disorders.
One thing that's fun about working at Stanford is being able to talk with really smart people. It's even more fun to see what happens when those smart people dream big. Now, they face the hard work of turning those dreams into reality.
Previously: This is your brain on a computer chip, Dinners spark neuroscience conversation, collaboration and Brain's gain: Stanford neuroscientist discusses two major new initiatives
Photo by Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock
