”Humans have been thinking about how the nervous system works since the ancient Greeks. A couple of good theories have been presented, but in the last hundred years it not much has happened. Today, there are so many new techniques that I think the time is ripe to rethink old explanation models and try to find new ones,” he says.
The brain lacks a model equivalent to the DNA helix or the periodic table, professor Swanson says.
”Neuroscience has traditionally held notion that the nervous system is hierarchical, with the cortex at the top and the spine at the bottom. But, over the past thirty years, people, thanks to the internet, have begun to understand that the brain may instead function as a network.”
Larry W. Swanson is involved in the brain's equivalent of the HUGO genome project, with the objective to identify the brain’s "connectome" or complete wiring diagram.
”The database of the brain that we are building can help us almost in the same way as a gps: if we enter where in the brain we are and where we want to go, so it will be able to suggest a route for us.”
”But are there not individual differences in brain? You could draw a map over every city, but a map of New York's impossible to use in Paris?”
”Certainly there are individual differences, but the brain is still organized so that one can expect certain regions in certain places,” says professor Swanson.
Larry W. Swanson's own four-component model takes into account that sensory input, state, and thoughts can all result in movement or feedback in response to movement. For example you can take a step in response to that you stepped on something sharp, or as a result of that you first thought about it. Your state also plays a role: if you dream that you go for a stroll, no movement will be initiated, since the link to the muscles is temporarily disabled. The beauty of the model is that it is not hierarchical; neither sensory input, state or thoughts are ruling the roost, but they come together more as a circle or a dynamic cycle.
It’s Larry W. Swanson’s conviction that all the brain's 500 components can be arranged in different compartments of this model.
Text: Anna Appelberg
Photo: Kennet Ruona
