Why do I want to be a neuroscientist?
I want to know how I "think".
René Descartes, French philosopher in 1600s, said "I think, therefore I am".
Then I thought "How I think?".
I just want to know what is changing in the brain when I change my recognition and/or create a new idea.
My interest is also important for world society.
There are no critical approach for most (all?) of mental diseases, because it is not still unclear the mechanism of the disease and the normal function.
My research will be contribute to take hints for the therapies.
Some of abilities of computer are far above that of human being such as calculation, memory and precise communication.
But some abilities are far below that of human such as creativity, flexibility for environmental change and energy usage.
My research will be contribute to inspire the computer functions.
How will I research?
First, observe neural activities,
Second, analyze and extract the important properties,
at Last, reconstruct the system.
I use Imaging methods for observation,
mathematical and statistical methods for analysis,
optogenitic or electronic methods for reconstruction.
I am a biologist.
In this field, Genetic Encoded Calcium Indicators (GECI) and Optogenitic methods spread their application fields.
Benefits of these methods are we can apply the indicators and manipulators in cell-type specific manner in many cell simultaneously and chronically.
It is not achieved by chemical dye injection.
We need to process mass data such as Calcium imaging, multi-electrode electrophysiology and gene-chips.
In my case, I need to handle a much of imaging data.
To handle these data, the importance of statistical methods will be increased.
To complete the research, it should reconstruct the phenomenon to show its causality.
I think there are two ways for the reconstruction, biological methods (optogenetics) and systematic methods (electronics).
In biological methods, we can control the neural activities by using a specific color lights and light sensitive channel proteins.
By using this system, we can control the model animal behaviors and can show causality of the neural activities and the behaviors.
In systematic methods, we can also use computer simulations.
But I think, the mechanism of information processing of animals and computers is too different to mimic each other. (I don't describe in detail here)
Therefore, we will reach the limitation in the future.
Electronics, constructed from electronic devises such as resistance and condenser, is more flexible and than computer simulation and low energy consuming.
What do I research?
I want to catch the time point of recognition change.
I want to know how change neural activities and mechanisms of the changing when a animal change their behaviors.
I observe a brain of mice performing behavioral task with microscopy imaging.
During the behavior task, the rule of the task is changed (called reversal learning, set-shifting).
I want to catch the change of voltage, calcium ion and other molecular dynamics in single cell or neural population level, when they try to apply the new rules.
I cannot judge whether I can write about our main job, because of collaborators, paper publish and confidentiality problems.
I will write here about reconstruction by electronic methods (it is hobby for me) and papers for my research.
