I’ve had a handful of moments in my life when a piece of information provided a profound enough insight that it forced me to reconsider nearly everything. This video (and the study it came from) was one of those moments.
Prior to this work, I was really struggling trying to get a handle on how to construct all of this. There’s a never ending sea of contradictory results, all of which support a billion different theories, none of which were internally consistent. Trying to synthesize mountains of shitty data led to the same shitty models that currently abound.
It was genuinely frustrating that we couldn’t answer even basic questions like “how is behavior/memory formed?” It’s such a fundamental question that nearly everything else relies upon, but there was no work which demonstrated behavior/memory as it was forming. Instead, we had a sea of theories with results custom tailored to support those theories.
This work literally changed everything from the ground up for me. This work instantly invalidated all of the ephemeral theories of memory, no longer could memory be about “brain waves” or some other kind of magic, it is a physical process that we could see.
That’s the truly amazing thing about this work, if you’ve ever wondered “how does behavior form?”, you’re literally watching it. It’s not about quantum dopamine, it’s about iterative interactions between cells.
Just as amazing, you can “see” when the animal is “thinking” about performing the behavior, before it’s performed. This was the genesis of the conceit that “behavior” is just expressed “memory”.
This further narrowed the scope for me, while the study itself is thinking in terms of neurons, when I looked at this I saw a spot in the middle coordinating all of this activity, an undescribed perturber driving this process.
From the search for that perturber, I was able to strip context from astrocytes and take another look at them in the context of this work. And that opened up the whole world of glia in general, not as ancillary cells, but as the primary driver of adaptive nervous system function.
It was this work which shifted my thinking about nervous systems from electro-chemical gradients to the metabolic underpinnings of those effects. And much like the idiom “follow the money” works as a way to trace behavioral activity across geographic/social boundaries, it became obvious that “follow the energy” was probably true for internal behavior.
This work is cited mostly in reference to the imaging techniques, but the gravity of what it shows, one of the most fundamental concepts of neuroscience, behavior being born and modified, completely changed everything for me.