The field of neuroscience needs a breakthrough like the discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson, said V.S. Ramachandran, renowned neuroscientist and Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, University of California, on Friday.
Delivering a lecture at the Asian College of Journalism here on “Embodied minds and disembodied brains — what neurology can tell us about human nature,” he said Crick and Watson not only described the structure, but also figured out the mechanism of how the genetic information was getting copied.
While neuroscientists were doing experiments that provide insights into what different regions of the brain do, he said they were trying to do what Crick and Watson did with DNA to understand more on how exactly the brain functions. “There are some promising leads,” he said. The human brain was estimated to have 100 billion neurons and the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeding the number of elementary particles in the known universe was the most complex matter in the universe.
