Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology,[1]biopsychology, or psychobiology[2] is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals. [3]

Behavioral neuroscience as a scientific discipline emerged from a variety of scientific and philosophical traditions in the 18th and 19th centuries. In philosophy, people like Ren Descartes proposed physical models to explain animal and human behavior. Descartes, for example, suggested that the pineal gland, a midline unpaired structure in the brain of many organisms, was the point of contact between mind and body. Descartes also elaborated on a theory in which the pneumatics of bodily fluids could explain reflexes and other motor behavior. This theory was inspired by moving statues in a garden in Paris.[4]

Other philosophers also helped give birth to psychology. One of the earliest textbooks in the new field, The Principles of Psychology by William James, argues that the scientific study of psychology should be grounded in an understanding of biology:

Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology.[5]

The emergence of both psychology and behavioral neuroscience as legitimate sciences can be traced from the emergence of physiology from anatomy, particularly neuroanatomy. Physiologists conducted experiments on living organisms, a practice that was distrusted by the dominant anatomists of the 18th and 19th centuries.[6] The influential work of Claude Bernard, Charles Bell, and William Harvey helped to convince the scientific community that reliable data could be obtained from living subjects.

Even before the 18th and 19th century, behavioral neuroscience was beginning to take form as far back as 1700 B.C.[7] The question that seems to continually arise is what is the connection between the mind and body. The debate is formally referred to as the mind-body problem. There are two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mindbody problem; monism and dualism.[4]Plato and Aristotle are two of several philosophers who participated in this debate. Plato believed that the brain was where all mental thought and processes happened.[7] In contrast, Aristotle believed that the brain served the purpose of cooling down the emotions derived from the heart.[4] The mind-body problem was a stepping stone toward attempting to understand the connection between the mind and body.

Another debate arose about was localization of function or functional specialization versus equipotentiality which played a significant role in the development in behavioral neuroscience. As a result of localization of function research, many famous people found within psychology have come to various different conclusions. Wilder Penfield was able to develop a map of the cerebral cortex through studying epileptic patients along with Rassmussen.[4] Research on localization of function has led behavioral neuroscientist to a better understanding of which parts of the brain control behavior. This is best exemplified through the case study of Phineas Gage.

The term "psychobiology" has been used in a variety of contexts, emphasizing the importance of biology, which is the discipline that studies organic, neural and cellular modifications in behavior, plasticity in neuroscience, and biological diseases in all aspects, in addition, biology focuses and analyzes behavior and all the subjects it is concerned about, from a scientific point of view. In this context, psychology helps as a complementary, but important discipline in the neurobiological sciences. The role of psychology in this questions is that of a social tool that backs up the main or strongest biological science. The term "psychobiology" was first used in its modern sense by Knight Dunlap in his book An Outline of Psychobiology (1914).[8] Dunlap also was the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Psychobiology. In the announcement of that journal, Dunlap writes that the journal will publish research "...bearing on the interconnection of mental and physiological functions", which describes the field of behavioral neuroscience even in its modern sense.[8]

In many cases, humans may serve as experimental subjects in behavioral neuroscience experiments; however, a great deal of the experimental literature in behavioral neuroscience comes from the study of non-human species, most frequently rats, mice, and monkeys. As a result, a critical assumption in behavioral neuroscience is that organisms share biological and behavioral similarities, enough to permit extrapolations across species. This allies behavioral neuroscience closely with comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and neurobiology. Behavioral neuroscience also has paradigmatic and methodological similarities to neuropsychology, which relies heavily on the study of the behavior of humans with nervous system dysfunction (i.e., a non-experimentally based biological manipulation).

Synonyms for behavioral neuroscience include biopsychology, biological psychology, and psychobiology.[9]Physiological psychology is a subfield of behavioral neuroscience, with an appropriately narrower definition

The distinguishing characteristic of a behavioral neuroscience experiment is that either the independent variable of the experiment is biological, or some dependent variable is biological. In other words, the nervous system of the organism under study is permanently or temporarily altered, or some aspect of the nervous system is measured (usually to be related to a behavioral variable).

Different manipulations have advantages and limitations. Neural tissue destroyed by surgery, electric shock or neurotoxcin is a permanent manipulation and therefore limits follow-up investigation.[23] Most genetic manipulation techniques are also considered permanent.[23] Temporary lesions can be achieved with advanced in genetic manipulations, for example, certain genes can now be switched on and off with diet.[23] Pharmacological manipulations also allow blocking of certain neurotransmitters temporarily as the function returns to its previous state after the drug has been metabolized.[23]

In general, behavioral neuroscientists study similar themes and issues as academic psychologists, though limited by the need to use nonhuman animals. As a result, the bulk of literature in behavioral neuroscience deals with mental processes and behaviors that are shared across different animal models such as:

However, with increasing technical sophistication and with the development of more precise noninvasive methods that can be applied to human subjects, behavioral neuroscientists are beginning to contribute to other classical topic areas of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, such as:

Behavioral neuroscience has also had a strong history of contributing to the understanding of medical disorders, including those that fall under the purview of clinical psychology and biological psychopathology (also known as abnormal psychology). Although animal models do not exist for all mental illnesses, the field has contributed important therapeutic data on a variety of conditions, including:

Nobel Laureates

The following Nobel Prize winners could reasonably be considered behavioral neuroscientists or neurobiologists. (This list omits winners who were almost exclusively neuroanatomists or neurophysiologists; i.e., those that did not measure behavioral or neurobiological variables.)

Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

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Behavioral neuroscience - Wikipedia

On March 9, the Emmet ONeal Library and UAB will come together to hold their second Neuroscience Caf.

Created by leadership with the Comprehensive Neuroscience Center at UAB, the program features a series of talks organized by Mountain Brook residents Dr. Peter King, professor of neurology at UAB, and Dr. Laura Volpicelli-Daley, assistant professor of neurology at UAB.

The series was designed to inform communities on disease topics, King said, and is held at various local libraries. The upcoming lecture at EOL will cover Substance Abuse and Addiction: From Molecular Mechanisms to Therapeutics, and is led by Dr. Cayce Paddock, director of addiction psychiatry at UAB, and Dr. Jeremy Day, a UAB neuroscientist who is studying the regulation of genes involved in addiction. Other topics in the Mountain Brook series include depression, concussions in football, sleep disorders, autism, Alzheimers disease and Parkinsons disease.

These brain disorders have a high and often devastating impact on patients and their families, King said. UAB has a wealth of expertise in these brain disorders, both at the clinical and research level, and the caf is an opportunity to inform the community about these disorders and the exciting progress that has been made in understanding the causes and advancing new treatments.

The caf features a presentation designed to be understood by anyone with an interest in neuroscience without having a background in it, King said, but suggests people at high school age or older will benefit the most.

The caf starts at 6:30 p.m., and no registration is required. Subsequent Neuroscience Cafs will discuss autism on April 13 and Alzheimers on May 11. For more information, contact the Emmet ONeal Library at 879-0459.

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For Bryan Johnson, the founder and CEO of neuroscience startup Kernel, the question is when, not if, we all have computer chips inside of our brains. Kernel, founded last fall with more than $100 million of Johnsons own money, is trying to better understand the human brain, so that we may one day program it to improve.

The company is focusing first on medical applications, to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse and complex ways the brain can fail. Eventually, Johnson would like to move toward augmenting the organ to make us smarter and healthier and pave the way for interfacing directly with computing devices.

Kernel wants to improve human cognition

Johnson, who made his fortune selling his payments company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million in 2013, doesnt have past experience in neuroscience. He is, however, riding a new wave of interest from Silicon Valley. There is a growing fear, among some futurists and other Silicon Valley elite, that humans will develop a crippling dependence on machines and software that continue to rapidly accelerate beyond our capabilities and understanding. This is a fear not necessarily shared by the neuroscience community, which is less focused on enhancing human intelligence, at least right now, than they are on treating people with Alzheimer's and helping paraplegics regain movement.

Yet the goal of Kernel, ultimately, is to allow humans to outcompete or at least co-evolve alongside machines by becoming a little digital themselves. Kernel has made some big claims: promising to improve neurodegenerative disease, for instance, to help pave the way for improving cognition. But for the last decade, brain implants have only dealt with movements, and have typically only been used in paraplegic people beyond experimental medical trials and stimulation devices for conditions like epilepsy.

We know if we put a chip in the brain and release electrical signals, that we can ameliorate symptoms of Parkinson's, Johnson tells me. This has been done for spinal cord pain, obesity, anorexia what hasnt been done is the reading and writing of neural code. Johnson points to the programming of yeast cells and CRISPR gene editing as examples of breakthroughs that apply the principles of computing to living organisms. What I wanted to do was work with the brain the same way we work with other complex biological systems like biology and genetics.

Of course, our understanding of genes is much farther along that our understanding of the brain. Frankly, the technologies we have for interacting with the brain are blunt tools at best, says Blake Richards, a neuroscientist and assistant professor and the University of Toronto who focuses on how the brain modifies itself and learns from experience. Most neuroprostheses involve dropping a big array of electrodes into the brain.

The technologies we have for interacting with the human brain are blunt tools at best.

This makes Johnsons vision sound both difficult and distant, with a laundry list of scientific obstacles standing in its way. He will need more money hes currently declining outside investment but may take venture capital funds in the future. The project also requires time, perhaps decades, to achieve anything close to Kernels cyborg vision, which currently resides only in fiction. But despite these hurdles, Johnson is intent on starting now with Kernel as one of the early leaders in an emerging hybrid field, one that blends the cash-flush, experimental spirit of Silicon Valley with the most cutting-edge neuroscience research.

Brain hacking, so to speak, has been a futurist fascination for decades. The idea that we will, inevitably, have chips in our brains and ways to interface directly with computing devices has been a staple of the most seminal cyberpunk works, from William Gibsons Neuromancer to Masamune Shirows Ghost in the Shell to the Wachowskis The Matrix. The reality, however, is far more complicated and dangerous. Very few people in the world have multi-electrode arrays implanted inside their skulls today. Those who do only undergo the invasive surgery required as a last resort, to alleviate the symptoms of severe neurological conditions or as a way to restore movement to paralyzed patients or allow amputees to move prosthetic limbs.

Richards is skeptical of any company promising advancements that require invasive surgery. People are only going to be amenable to the idea [of an implant] if they have a very serious medical condition they might get help with, he adds. Most healthy individuals are uncomfortable with the idea of having a doctor crack open their skull.

Johnson is first to admit the difficulties Kernel must reckon with to even begin working on these types of technologies, principally the idea of working exclusively with patients who have severe neurological conditions. He says that working with brain implants is a requirement right now. Theres no tech that exists in the world that allows you to be outside the brain and gain access to critical data, he says. You need to be inside the brain, inside the skull. Down the line, Kernel would like to explore less invasive ways of working with the human brain.

Yet even then, moving beyond the medical field and into the realm of improving cognition requires a significant amount of scientific progress, Richards points out. We understand very little about the human brain compared with what we understand about the mouse brain, he says. Almost all of our data on the human brain comes from epileptic patients, which is problematic for understanding how the brain works at large.

You need to be inside the brain, inside the skull.

To really understand the brain, Richards adds, will take years of work. Well need to hone how we gather data from the brain itself a challenging task with its own complications and improve our understanding of how the brain carries out core functions. From there, researchers will still have to work within the confines of ethical medical trials and regulatory boundaries that restrict how and to what effect we can work on human brains. As it stands today, Richards says, we dont even yet have have a thorough grasp of how the brain does everyday tasks like storing information we can recall later or letting us conjure conversations from years in the past. The computations and algorithms carried in the brain are still largely mysterious to us.

These challenges havent stopped Johnson from setting his sights on neuroscience as the next frontier. While companies have in the past tried to make commercial headway in the field of neuroprosthetics, Johnson is focusing instead on investing in research that may yield new insights into the brain. He may be one of the first to pour a Silicon Valley fortune into the field, but he suspects others will follow in his quest to transform the brain as a computing platform, even if it takes years of research and billions of dollars of investment.

For Johnson, those stipulations are just part of the deal. Money has always been a means to an end for the 39-year-old entrepreneur. After he sold Braintree to PayPal, Johnson decided that what he did next had to have the maximum positive impact possible. So he began talking with friends, experts, and fellow tech industry contemporaries, trying to discover where and for what his wealth could be best used to explore.

After talking with hundreds of people, Johnson says he decided that neuroscience had the most potential. Intelligence is the most precious and powerful resource for humans, he says. Weve always built these tools, starting with the rock, thermostat, calculator. Now we have AI. Our tools and [digital] intelligence are increasing at great velocity. On the flip side, human intelligence is just about the same as its always been.

Intelligence is the most precious and powerful resource for humans.

So Johnson enlisted the help of some of the best scientists in the field to start looking into neuroprosthetics. These are devices implanted within the skull that mimic, substitute, or assist functions of the brain, ranging from controlling the motor cortex to preventing the onset of seizures. Johnsons idea, at least at first, is to have his team at Kernel explore and better understand core brain functions like information recall, memory, and neuronal communication.

To do this, the company is developing its own hardware and software to try and alleviate the devastating effects of neurological and degenerative diseases like epilepsy, dementia, and Alzheimer's. Its being aided greatly by the research and expertise of Theodore Berger, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California. Back in 2002, Bergers research proved that it was possible to use software and mathematical modeling to replicate the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for memory and its eventual degradation. Nearly a decade later, Bergers lab at USC used a chip implanted inside the brain of rats to restore lost memory and improve information recall.

Now, Berger splits his time between USC and Kernel as the startups acting chief science officer. Kernel itself, now a little more than 20 employees, operates out of Los Angeles, near Bergers lab where the team can collaborate with the biomedical engineers there and observe the scientists work. Kernel plans to gather data from human trials, with an implantable medical device not unlike the one used in Bergers animal trials back in 2011.

To help Kernel and aid in its longer-term efforts, the company has also scooped up Kendall Research Systems (KRS), a spin-out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that focuses on neural interface devices for use in research and clinical trials. As part of the deal, announced today, Kernel is bringing on KRS founder and CEO Christian Wentz. Johnson has also courted some other big names in the neuroscience field from the MIT community. Ed Boyden, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, has signed on as chief scientific advisor. And Adam Marblestone, a neuroscientists who focuses on improving data collection from the brain, is now Kernels chief strategy officer, having worked in the past with Boydens Synthetic Neurobiology Group.

I cant agree more than these things are all possible.

I cant agree more that these things are all possible, says Chad Bouton, a biomedical engineering veteran of the Battelle Institute and now the vice president of advanced engineering and technology at the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research. What I often say is we are trying to figure out how to crack the neural code in the human body. If we can crack the neural code, then we can unlock so many doors.

Bouton says that weve already made substantial progress in figuring out how the motor cortex drives the function of limbs. We can crack the code in the motor area of the brain, he says. But if we could crack the code in the rest of the nervous system, and understand these messages passing back and forth, we would be able to better diagnose and treat diseases.

In the future, however, Johnson has grander ambitions beyond medical treatment. He wants to use these implants and hopefully, one day, make the process of receiving them less invasive to augment human intelligence. He envisions a world where the human brain is made smarter, faster, and more creative. Most importantly, however, Johnson sees a world where humans, and not just machines, improve over time.

Artificial intelligence may soon displace millions of jobs and render obsolete the livelihoods of everyday workers or, in the minds of some more outlandish technologists, induce a doomsday event for the human race. This is another driving force behind the creation of Kernel.

I think if humanity were to identify a singularly thing to work on, the thing that would demand the greatest minds of our generation, its human intelligence, Johnson says, specifically, the ability to co-evolve with artificial intelligence.

It is for this reason that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has begun putting together a team of his own to explore the possibilities of human augmentation, first for medical purposes and inevitably for human enhancement. Last week, Musk dropped hints of his interest in human enhancement by telling a crowd at the World Government Summit in Dubai by saying that we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. His new venture, however, remains relatively under wraps for now, with a public announcement sometime soon.

Elon Musk is also working on human augmentation

As far as I know, Elon and I are the only two pursuing this from a commercial perspective, Johnson says. Thats fantastic. Im so happy that hes in the game. Johnson notes that the number of calls hes received from interested investors has increased since low-key chatter of Musks plans began circulating in the Bay Area late last year.

Even in the neuroscience community, there is a general consensus that enhancing both AI and human cognition are complementary goals. The current success in AI came out because of their mimicking of the ways the brain operates, says Richards, who himself studied AI before transitioning to neuroscience research. Theres a building cross-talk between AI and neuroscience whereby AI takes inspiration from neuroscience and neuroscience takes inspiration from AI. Slowly but surely were working toward a broad theory of intelligence, both artificial and natural.

Whether Kernel helps the humanity achieve that broad theory and goes even further beyond will largely depend on how it decides to use Johnsons money, and whether the hurdles of scientific progress impede the founders bold vision of the future. Were entertained by Black Mirror, but outside of that, were not discussing [human intelligence] as a populace, Johnson says. Im trying to get the best minds of our generation in government and tech and media to talk about this problem. Brain science is the new rocket science.

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