Article by maximillian raschke

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lways on the forefront of modern neuroscience, one man is paving the path for new discoveries. William (Bill) Newsome is the Director of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute. When it comes to getting the new program launched, Bill Newsome takes on whatever challenge comes his way, and does “anything that needs to be done.” As the director of the institute, Dr. Newsome is working to get people from different disciplines to think together about the mysteries of the brain and to understand deeply how the brain works. Traveling across the US, to England, to France, to Switzerland, to China and South K o r e a , Newsome is sharing h i s

findings with people from all over the world and is bringing back the best ideas to answer the biggest mysteries about ourselves.

William

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ewsome f i r s t found himself on the path to becoming a scientist in his 9th grade biology class.

Taught by “a very good and very demanding teacher,” Newsome found himself wanting to do well in the class

Newsome

by Max Raschke

and learned that he really enjoyed biology. “I remember one day when (I was) looking through a microscope at little drops of water taken out of a pond. I could see all these little organisms swimming around in what to the naked eye appeared like a clear drop of water.” It was then that Bill Newsome set his sights on becoming a microbiologist. When Newsome graduated from high school, he was advised to be a physics major “because, with a physics undergraduate degree, you could do anything you wanted to in graduate school.”

It gave Newsome options to shift disciplines in the event he changed his mind. So, he was physics major as an undergrad at Stetson University, a small liberal arts college in Florida.

It was at Stetson where Newsome first started gaining some interest in neuroscience. “Going to graduate-school, I decided there were three subjects that were really interesting to me in biology that would be worth studying. One was, ‘How do genes work?’, second was, ‘How do brains work?’, and the third was, ‘What’s the origin of life?’” Newsome applied to one graduate program focused in each of those three areas, and was accepted into all of them. “Almost serendipitously, I wound up doing the neurobiology

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one. ... That was when I was 22 years old. That was 40 years ago, and here I am 40 years later.”

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is getting better, but it’s still not nearly as good as we are” (Newsome). Newsome became particularly interested in the question of how “millions of nerve cells and visual parts of our brain interact electrically and chemically to make it possible for us to see?” Because of the fact that nerve cells are on order of 20 microns w i d e (half

ill Newsome’s first lab started when he was in graduate school.

Newsome was particularly interested in vision and how the brain perceives what we see. It seems so effortless for us to recognize objects in our environment. What we fail to realize is that is a really, “It is possible to monitor the really hard problem.

Even information as it is passed along the most adfrom one nerve cell to the next vanced visual and to see how the electrical recognition programs exinformation processing in the isting today brain is related to what the pale in comparison to animal sees.”-Newsome even a baby’s vision system.

“Artificial vision

the width of a human hair), the only way to see their electrochemical activity is to surgically implant micro electrodes into the brain. Recording the electrical signals from the cells allows neuroscientists to see the different stages of visual perception. Then, it is possible to monitor the information as it is passed along from one nerve cell to the next and to see how the electrical information processing in the brain is related to what the animal sees. Because of the need for a surgical implant, Newsome started working with monkeys. “Because I can train monkeys to tell me what they see, monkeys in my lab play video games. They sit and look at a computer monitor and we give them simple visual tasks like color discrimination, motion discrimination, or we ask them to move joy-

sticks to move a cursor on the screen. …

We can make inferences about the computations they do to move an object. We can quantify their behavior and, at the same time, record the electrical activity out of the brain and understand how the electrical activity is related to the ability to see and compose these visual motor tasks.”

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“It linked the properties of the cells at the physiological level to an animal’s actual perception of what it is seeing.” -Newsome

hroughout Newsome’s research career, his labs have made several key breakthroughs. Newsome found that you could alter one’s perception of motion by using electrodes to stimulate certain regions of the brain. By send-

ing electrical signals through certain brain cells, it is possible to change whether or not a person or animal sees an object moving left, when in reality, the object is actually moving right. Some of Newsome’s colleagues could not believe what he had accomplished. “It linked the properties of the cells at the physiological level to an animal’s actual perception of what it is seeing. In fact, I had people in my field tell me that they did not believe the result after I first starting giving public

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talks about it. They said, ‘your experiments look good … but I just don’t believe that one little column of cells in the cortex can control a fairly like complex behavior like that.’” Not only has this breakthrough earned Newsome several awards for his findings, it also essentially started a whole new field of neurophysiology of visual perception.

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ewsome has come a long way since then.

After working on Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, a program of the National Institutes of Health challenged to unlock “the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears” (Obama). New-

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some was asked by the President of Stanford University to be the Director of the “We are bringing people together new Stanford Neurosciences from a variety of disciplines, Institute. The linking Neuroscience to goal of the InstiEngineering, Chemistry, Physics, tute is to understand the brain Math, Psychology, the Social and behavior Sciences, Education, Law and both in health Business.” - Newsome and disease. The Institute was created to foster interdisciplinary collaborations between Chemexperts across Stanford. It’s istry, Physi c s , bringing people together from Math, Psychology, the Social a variety of disciplines, linking Sciences, Education, Law and Neuroscience to Engineering, Business. Stanford Neurosci-

ences Institute is supporting the training of new neuroscientists and planning a state of the art research center that will be the hub of the institute for years to come.

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euroscience itself is undergoing a renaissance, where new tools and techniques are allowing researchers to map the complexity of the networks in the brain and also to measure the signals flowing along these networks.

Bill Newsome and his colleagues at Stanford aim to accelerate new discoveries that will help us to understand how our brains make us who we are.

“Neuroscience itself is undergoing a renaissance�

- Tanya Raschke

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Works Cited “About Us.� Neurosciences Institute. Stanford University, n.d. Web. 20 May 2016.

Newsome, William. Interview by Maximillian Raschke. Stanford Clark Center, 23 March 2016 Newsome, William. Interview by Maximillian Raschke. Stanford Clark Center, 4 April 2016 Raschke, Tanya Interview by Maximillian Raschke.

Home, 4 April 2016

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