What will happen if we Do work without our mind on our work
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Every second of the day, your brain is fizzing with activity. Your neurons send signals to each other across a tiny gap between them, in turn spreading electrical messages across vast networks to make your brain do what it does.
If that signalling process goes awry, for whatever reason, it can lead to problems, including brain disorders or diseases.
But how much do we really understand about how the brain works and what goes wrong in disease? Not much, according to Nobel Laureate Prof Thomas Südhof, who spoke recently at Dublin City University(DCU) about the importance of research into brain basics.
“We don’t really know how the brain works, and what happens when it doesn’t work,” he says.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though: technological advances are offering us new insights into brain function and disease, according to Südhof, who shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 2013 for his work on understanding how brain cells communicate.
Genetic discoveries are changing perspectives, particularly in neuropsychiatric diseases, he notes. “Many mutations, maybe most, that predispose to autism and schizophrenia are mutations that happen new; these are not inherited.”
Meanwhile, Südhof’s own research has pinpointed key events and machinery involved in brain cell communication, and it turns out that some of those cellular players are altered in brain disease.
But this is just the start. Now we need to understand what those changes mean, he notes.
“I think there is a true opportunity to go from the gene mutations to the functional changes to therapeutic intervention. This opportunity, however, depends on understanding what the gene mutations do.”
Without such understanding, we are “guessing” when it comes to identifying therapies, he says.
“We need to focus on understanding the disease before we can focus on developing drugs. If we don’t actually know what we should make drugs against, we can’t make them; the understanding of the disease has to be a priority.”
If that signalling process goes awry, for whatever reason, it can lead to problems, including brain disorders or diseases.
But how much do we really understand about how the brain works and what goes wrong in disease? Not much, according to Nobel Laureate Prof Thomas Südhof, who spoke recently at Dublin City University(DCU) about the importance of research into brain basics.
“We don’t really know how the brain works, and what happens when it doesn’t work,” he says.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though: technological advances are offering us new insights into brain function and disease, according to Südhof, who shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 2013 for his work on understanding how brain cells communicate.
Genetic discoveries are changing perspectives, particularly in neuropsychiatric diseases, he notes. “Many mutations, maybe most, that predispose to autism and schizophrenia are mutations that happen new; these are not inherited.”
Meanwhile, Südhof’s own research has pinpointed key events and machinery involved in brain cell communication, and it turns out that some of those cellular players are altered in brain disease.
But this is just the start. Now we need to understand what those changes mean, he notes.
“I think there is a true opportunity to go from the gene mutations to the functional changes to therapeutic intervention. This opportunity, however, depends on understanding what the gene mutations do.”
Without such understanding, we are “guessing” when it comes to identifying therapies, he says.
“We need to focus on understanding the disease before we can focus on developing drugs. If we don’t actually know what we should make drugs against, we can’t make them; the understanding of the disease has to be a priority.”
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