What is “brain engineering”?
The Brain Engineering Laboratory has as its goal a fundamental understanding of the brain: its mechanisms, operation, and behaviors. There has been explosive growth of information about the brain from a broad range of fields including neuroanatomy, physiology, biochemistry and behavior, and tools from mathematics, computer science and engineering are brought to bear to make sense of the voluminous data. Our laboratory contributes to these fields and uses these data in an integrative way to construct hypotheses of how the brain operates to enable us to think, perceive, feel, and act. Inevitably, as a scientific field arrives at an understanding of its object of study, we are able to use the information in a proactive way: to construct synthetic models of the system, to enhance its effectiveness, and to fix it when it breaks. For instance, as biological systems have become increasingly understood, it has become possible to diagnose diseases, to develop drugs to treat them, and to build d
