Question: What are you ging to do with the information that you recive? Will you be using human trials?

Martha Havenith answered on 21 Jun 2015:

Hi Shardblade, good question! The information I can get with my experiments is important (I’d like to think 🙂 ) because it can tell us more about how neurons communicate information to each other. So if all goes well, we will find out which patterns of activity help the brain to transmit more information. That would be brilliant, but it’s far away from directly helping humans. It’s kind of like the difference between understanding the principle of creating movement through pressure, and building a fully functioning steam train.
The method I use in mice (using a virus to make neurons sensitive to light) seems to work great for them – the neurons stay happy and normal, the mice don’t get sick or mind in any way as far as we can see…But mice only live about 6 months at most. What if this technique had some weird effect 20 years later? All these kinds of questions have to be tested very carefully before we can think about using the same technique in humans.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t use any ideas from our experiments when working with humans. For example, we just found that aggressive mice get less aggressive when we train them to pay better attention. We can’t use exactly the same technique in humans, but we could try the general idea of training aggressive people to use their attention better. Colleagues of mine who work with human patients have just started coming up with ideas of how we could do that.