The Grand Unified theory of Neuroscience ???

A good friend of mine has once bolted me with a very queer question. He was well aware of my work in the field of cognitive sciences and neurology, thus hoped to clear his doubts. He asked one of the very base questions ever asked by humans. “When is medical science ever going to come with a unified theory on how the brain works, Shyam? There Einstein’s general theory of relativity and Newton’s law of gravitation in physics, why not in brain-science?”

I stood there perplexed, not knowing what to say. I knew what conscience of the human mind is, but still could not find words to per play his query. Initially I laced off the topic and deemed it as debauchery of sheer nonsense.

“I know what it is, It is a layman’s question, does not require much of my attention”, I thought.

But the more I thought about it, the more I remained entangled in doubt. It took me almost three months to come to a near convincing answer, which probably, is the next pep project I intend to take up.

I know not, the answer to the latter question, that is posed, but yes, I can try and tell you more about the former. But, before that let me tell you a neurological case I have encountered during my research.

An amateur athlete lost his arm lost his arm in a motorcycle accident, but continues to feel a “phantom arm” with vivid sensations of movement. He can wave the missing arm in midair, “touch” things and even reach out to “grab” a cup of coffee. If I pull the cup away, he yelps in pain. “Ouch! I can feel it being wrenched from my fingers”, he says, wincing.

I met a school teacher who had suffered from a stroke that paralyzed her left side of her body, but still insists that her left arm is not paralyzed. Once, when I asked her, whose arm she was lying in the bed next to her, she explained that the limb belonged to her brother’s.

A librarian from Bangalore, who had a different kind of stoke began to laugh uncontrollably. This went on for a full day, until she literally died of laughter.

None of these people are “Crazy”; sending them to psychiatrists would be a waste of time. Rather, each of them suffers from damage to a specific part of the brain that leads to bizarre but highly characteristic changes in behavior. They hear voices, feel missing limbs, see things that no one else does, and also make extraordinary claims about the society they live in. yet for most part they are lucid, rational and no more insane than you or I.

Although enigmatic disorders like these have perplexed and intrigued physicians throughout history, there are often disregarded from any scientific survey. Most studies are labeled “File and Forget” and are lost to the desks collecting dust. This is because physicians today, focus on alleviating symptoms and making people well again, they not necessarily, try to dig deeper to learn how the brain works.

Odd symptoms such as the above are mostly blamed for the patient’s upbringing or even the parent’s. Far from being just curious, these odd symptoms actually illustrate the fundamental principles of how the human mind functions, shedding light on the nature of body image, language, laughter, dreams, depression and other hallmarks on the architecture of human brain.

Have you ever wondered why some jokes are funny, while the others aren't? Why you are inclined to believe or dis-believe God? Surprisingly, we can begin to provide answers to none of these questions.

My answer is that we are not yet at the stage where we can formulate grand unified theories on mind or the brain. Every science has to go through the an initial "experiment" or phenomena- driven stage-in which its practitioners are still discovering the basic laws- before it reaches a more sophisticated theory-driven stage.

Consider the evolution of ideas on electricity and magnetism – Victorian physicist; Michael Faraday was the first to study magnets systematically. In one experiment – which can be ascertained by even a school boy – he simply placed a magnet over a paper , showered iron filings on it, by which he demonstrated the existence of magnetic field lines. In the second experiment, he moved a bar magnet to and fro in the center of coiled wire, to prove the relation between electric current and magnetism. These experiments set stage for Maxwell’s equations on electromagnetic waves, which were formulated decades later.

My point is simply that neuroscience today, is in the “Faraday” stage, not in Maxwell’s, a common misconception by both doctors and people, alike. I would love to be proved wrong, of course, and there is no harm in trying to construct formal theories about the brain, even if one fails. But for me, the best research strategy might be characterized as “tinkering”. Whenever, I use this word, many people look rather shocked, as if one couldn't possible do science by just playing around with ideas and without an overarching theory to guide one’s hunches. But that’s exactly what I mean (Although these hunches are far from random; they are always guided by intuition) it is fairly better to study science through exception, rather than to the shackles of the so called “rules of science”.