When I was in my senior year in highschool, near the beginning of the year, I was accepted into a highschool medical internship that took place at the local hospital. It was a great experience and I feel very fortunate that I was allowed to participate in such a program. We shadowed as many various positions as we could and I really got around to a lot of different ones. I at one time signed up to go see the "EEG unit" or so I though that was what it was called. Come to find out, an EEG was just a device used by the Neuroscience department of the hospital. I finally found my way to the place I needed to be and was greeted and taken by a Gail Phillips, one of the Neurologists at the hospital. She quickly apologized for the fact that there were no scheduled surgeries at the time and so we'd just have to sit and talk for a little while. (I had no idea I was getting into any surgeries that day anyway so I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be disappointed or not). The entire time was taken up by our conversation, a total of 4 hours. She decided to give me a brief overview of neuroscience and then help me find some good neuroscience schools and then she began to show me what passion was driving her. I can now understand why that field is so important. This has now become my passion. Let me explain:
I can only explain the brains functions in the most general and uneducated terms right now because, well, im still uneducated about it all. But I'll still do my best to make sense and sound reasonable. When you have a pain in your leg, or finger, or wherever in your body, is the pain you feel truly in that part of the body? Surprisingly no. The injury is there, but signals from the nerves in the area send signals first to the brain which it processes and then tells you that you are experiencing pain in that certain location. Every feeling or pain, every smell or taste, all of these things first have to go through the brain to be translated. This is one of the thousands of reasons that the brain is so important. With the nerves after nerves after nerves going through our bodies, there is little that our brains miss, especially the things internally that we may not be able to "feel" but the brain will still recognize subconsciously.
The idea that Gail shared with me is the hope of all Neurologists. It would be the answer to all diagnosis' if there could be a way found to "ask" the brain what was wrong with the body. If the brain is truly connected to all of the systems and in control of the subconscious actions of the body, then there must be a way to take advantage of that connection. If say there were an odd pain in the stomach region that doctors could not explain, a neurologist would "ask" the brain by finding out what signals its triggering to send what chemicals down to the stomach area to fix the problem. If we know what the brain is trying to do for the body, we may be able to also know what to do to help. If there are things "short circuiting" then we'd also be able to tell in the body that something is not receiving the proper signals. So, in general, we want to know what the brain knows so that we can help the brain do what it needs to do. There are many theories for asking the brain these questions but many are very much debated, especially by those who are afraid of the evil in the world and the opportunity to abuse the possible technology.
Gail supported the idea of developing a probe that could be placed on a brain to receive a constant flow of nervous signals. Essentially were that to happen, ever person could even check their own signals from their own computers. A doctors visit would mean logging onto the computer, sending in your code/frequency, and your doctor pulling up the information on his computer. From the various waves given from different parts of body and different functions operating, the doctor would be able to see which waves are off and whatnot and diagnose straight from the computer. I imagine there's no way real doctor visits would go obsolete but there would be much less needed due to the convenience of the new probes. The obvious scare with this is the wonder of what people could do with the probes, are they dangerous? Could people tap into them? We dont know, but the plusses for this method are immense. I'm not sure how I stand on that as of yet, but the idea of being able to diagnose for troubles through the means of asking the brain seems fascinating to me.
Neuroscience has a long way to go still. There is so much that will be and can be learned in this field. I hope to be a part of it but I know its going to take a lot of learning. Right now neuroscience is limited to actual neurological disorders and hospital support in that a neurologist can protect a surgeon from making a mistake during surgery by watching a monitor that will tell if a surgeon is touching nerves that he shouldn't. This is obviously important for spinal surgery and other related operations. Neuroscience however has the potential though to become an overlapping field of being the center for diagnosis for a countless amount of troubles. The question is, how do we get the brain to help us? That is what I hope to help other researchers to figure out. And if they figure that out before I'm out of school, then I'll be right there helping people get those diagnosis'.
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