Considering the dire reality of yet another Covid-19 year, it’s refreshing to consider that the world is still progressing within various fields. May it bring a smile to your face to ponder some of 2021’s biggest breakthroughs in neuroscience and biology.
The brain is often thought of as being divided into distinct regions for perception, memory, speech, awareness and other faculties. These neat partitions reflect a wealth of clinical and experimental data, but they also point to our subjective experience of these processes as separable categories of mental function.
Mounting evidence suggests that it’s a mistake to believe that our capacities are split into separate pathways in anatomically distinct brain areas. On closer examination, parts of the brain strongly associated with specific functions are sometimes also linked to unexpectedly different functions as well: e.g. most of the activity in the brain’s perception centers is tied to body movements. Neuroscientists are still sorting out the significance of that discovery, but it helps to explain observations that the background “noise” measured in the brain’s electrical signals encodes information about what the body is doing.
Researchers had shown that a network of “grid cells” in the brain enables us to map where we are in space and also seems to help us keep track of memories and abstract concepts. Now it appears that this elegant grid system only works for mapping in two dimensions; we and other mammals seem to rely on a more complex, less well-understood system for knowing where we are in 3D.
For a long time, scientists studied sleep primarily as a neurological phenomenon: Our consciousness and behavior obviously changed when we went to sleep, but our physiology seemed to be about the same as when we were relaxed and motionless. However, that view changed significantly during the past few decades when experiments detected subtle chemical shifts in the body during slumber and found evidence that even creatures with rudimentary brains sleep. This year it was discovered that the hydra, a tiny animal so simple that it lacks a centralized nervous system, spends a part of every four hours asleep. It now appears that when the first sleep occurred a billion years ago, it may have served a metabolic function that helped cells repair themselves.
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