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[Man] What I, what I should have said was

we don't necessarily want you or anyone else

controlling our thought process.

[Jonathan] If we control your brains,

we control your thoughts.

(man laughs)

[Woman] He can make you want it.

Is that good?

[Jonathan] I think it's excellent.

I understand stuff.

This is a World Health Report that was published

the end of the last century predicting what

the major diseases were going to be affecting the world.

And number 3 is major depression,

probably in terms of killing people but certainly

on their lifestyle and their morbitity.

It's all the downstream consequences of being depressed.

Makes you more likely to get diseases.

Means you're more likely to die from other things and so on.

It's a major, major health problem.

And then the question is how do you actually go about

improving that situation and what approaches do you have?

So the way in which we try to understand

how brains produce illness,

how brains produce behavior,

is at the level of the circuits within them.

And whereas in the past people had ideas

about a bad thing happening,

due to sort of a Sigmund Freud-type of analysis

of brain function we be due to some experience you had

and more recently, we've been using genetic approaches

to understand what might predispose you to an illness.

What we're trying now to do is say

that these problems arise from brain activity.

So let me take an example, we've done some genetic work

where we think that a set of genes involved in,

act in depolarization, is involved in emotion.

So it's not clear why something as basic as that would be

involved in the brain in emotional regulation.

So we actually thought, well, could we find it in flies?

So this is so basic, would you find it in a fly brain?

You do find it in a fly brain.

The fly has this particular gene,

has this particular enzyme so then we just have to test

whether the fly gets upset if we manipulate that part

of its cellular structure.

And we can do that in flies whereas as we couldn't do that

in humans and it's very difficult to do it in mammals.

But it's cheap and easy relatively to do it in flies

so we do that manipulation and low and behold

we find an expected change.

So you'll see in a moment two flies.

In one fly we've genetically engineered the neurons that

make it fly, so that when we turn a laser light on,

the fly will fly away.

While it's mate, who does not have light responsive nuerons

will stay behind.

So watch for the flash of light.

So this works well in flies where the light

can get into the brain but not so well in mammals

because we have a skull.

So there you've moved from thinking about a problem

on a rather global scale, having insight whether it's

a structural or functional process that might be concerned

and then test that hypothesis directly in a model organism.

So you need those resources to answer these questions.

We're going to have you grab the chairs,

move yourselves close enough to the board

to really be part of the conversation.

[Man In Audience] No one, Speak up.

There can be no one who doesn't have a certain degree

of discomfort, um, most of the people here

are supportive of all advances in technology.

We're not, you know, trying to stop

learning, but you must confront this

on a daily or at least, monthly basis.

[Jonathan] No, we want to control brains.

Our problem is brains don't want to be controlled,

so we have to overcome this barrier that brains have

inherently that they can't be controlled.

No, we definitely want to control brains.

(audience laughs)

What I've given you is a totally overblown

description of what's possible.

At the moment, you got that, so at the moment all we can do

is make a mouse run around and that's about as best

as we can get, and there's a little better,

we can make them go to sleep so you can put a light

in a part of the brain and then it'll fall asleep

and it'll wake up but in order to do anything more

sophisticated than that, I mean, it's just,

we're at the very, very beginning.

So I've got that initial problem, then I've got the problem

with the biology is horrendously complicated.

We only know a fraction of what's going on in brains,

we don't really know how they work,

we don't know how they produce feelings,

and without knowing that information,

how can I understand what's going wrong in somebody's brain.

So put those things together and you one have of the most

challenging problems in biology.

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