Revelations
Nathaniel Thiemann
10/15/15
I’m quite fond of what I study, because every time I start to get bored with science I learn something new that challenges my preconceived notions on life. We as humans try our best to define and model pretty much every natural phenomena there is. However, as history has shown, our attempts to explain these phenomena can often be proved wrong at any moment when new evidence arises. These moments make us aware of how short-sighted and inadequate our attempts to explain phenomena can be. I had one of these moments last week while listening to Christopher Moore’s talk during a common hour talk regarding his research at Brown University.
Professor Moore conducts his research in the Neuroscience department at Brown’s graduate school, where he works with mice to learn more about our own physiology. His lab uses optogenetics, which utilizes genetic engineering to induce bioluminescence in subjects, in order to image alert subjects at the cellular level. The use of optogenetics essentially turns cells into a rate meter, which can be used to measure a multitude of variables like change in intracellular Ca2+ concentration. Professor Moore and his lab used optogenetics to examine whether blood flow acted as a neuromodulator in mice. Enter my cathartic moment from last week, their results indicated that functional vascular response (hyperemia) forms a closed-interconnected-system between neural and astrocyte activity. In layman’s terms this means that increased blood flow through a region of the brain correlates to increased neural activity in that region. Professor Moore supported his hypothesis with images of neuronal dendrites wrapped around blood vessels, which could be stimulated from a number of mechanical, thermal, and chemical (namely gaseous NO) interactions.
Leonardo Da Vinci once wrote of connecting the unconnected and urged people to, “Realize that everything connects to everything else.” As a skeptic, I can poke more than a few holes in that generalization. However, there is some truth to Da Vinci’s statement, our world works in an intricate chain of systems which are all interconnected with other systems. This chain of systems ranges from the subatomic systems that hold matter together to the ecosystems we live in, and beyond to the workings of the universe. Therefore, it shouldn’t be very surprising that our own body has a similar amount of interconnected systems within it, as proposed by the hemo-neural network. It makes sense that our evolutionarily tuned bodies would integrate our two major sources of communication in the body (the nervous system and our cardiovascular system) to improve the rate of information sharing possible.
It is important to remember that the hemo-neural hypothesis is not yet accepted. However, the hypothesis essentially reaffirms and strengthens the principle that scientists currently use to justify fMRI results. Therefore, to me the question is not whether hyperemia is a neuromodulator, but what else is? Some believe that the human gut biome may be another neuromodulator that has not yet been fully investigated. While I have no plans to investigate this matter myself, I look forward to seeing what new facts science will reveal to me in the future.
