From modeling the biomechanics of
brain development to improving neuroimaging techniques to processing and
analyzing the data from studies using those techniques, physics expertise is
urgently needed in all areas of neuroscience. The brain is, of course, not new
ground for physicists. Two biophysicists, Aaron Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley
(with John Eccles), shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for
discovering how the neuron, the brain’s basic cell, transmits signals. And the
groundbreaking theoretical model of neural networks emerged from work by physicist
John Hopfield and others.
One of the major challenges for
neuroscience has been figuring out how to see what is happening inside the
living brain, which is opaque and, in the case of most vertebrates, encased
inside the skull. Since 1990, functional magnetic resonance imaging has enabled
researchers to detect activity in specific regions of the brain, and scientists
continue to push the technique toward higher power and resolution. But much of
the action today involves technologies that record the activity of single
neurons, potentially allowing researchers to map out entire brain circuits and
explore the brain’s computational code.
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