How does understanding the structure and function of the human brain help with diagnosis of disease?
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Deisseroth, what are the prospects of understanding the molecular basis of mental diseases such as schizophrenia, depression or autism, for which there are no or only limited animal models available?
It's hard to understand how a system goes wrong if you don't understand its key principles of operation in the first place.
Karl Deisseroth (KD): There are many steps that we need to take before we achieve that goal, which is worthy and important, but difficult. The first one is basic understanding. It's hard to understand how a system goes wrong if you don't understand its key principles of operation in the first place. So, even before we think about disease models, we need a fundamental understanding of brain function. To take your example of schizophrenia, many different domains are dysfunctional in these patients. For example, there is a failure in the assessment of reality, perhaps due to failure of communication between one part of the brain and another, but we have essentially zero concrete and causal knowledge of how these processes normally take place. That's the first step: understanding how different parts of the brain causally interact with each other—not just looking at correlations but the causal, brain‐wide dynamic principles—and how the brain operates as a unit. You can do that in animals perfectly well, and then start to perturb function in various ways.
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