Big Brains Prepare To Probe Big Questions

Inside a College Street tower, a soon-to-open institute will set inquiring minds to explore questions with implications for how human beings live in the future. Like:

• When are we responsible for our actions?
• What can the human brain do that machines can’t?
• How should we co-exist with machines?
• How can we best teach our kids?
• How do we come up with ideas?
• And … what’s the pope’s phone number?

Nicholas Turk-Browne raised those questions in describing why he’s pumped about his new job.

Turk-Browne, a Yale psychology professor, is the inaugural director of a neuroscience institute Yale is creating inside the 100 College St. tower.

Called the Wu Tsai Institute, it will bring together three different groups of researchers — biologists, data scientists, psychologists — to work on research about how the brain works. To explore memory and reasoning. To study ​“how our brains grow, change and rewire.” To ​“understand human cognition and human potential.”

An ​“historic transformational” gift from Joseph Tsai (cofounder and executive vice-chair of China’s Alibaba, with an estimated net worth of $12 billion) and Clara Wu Tsai is funding the creation of the institute. (Yale’s not saying how many zeroes are contained in that ​“historic” number.) Building on existing research, the institute will add an estimated 100 jobs (new professors, researchers, administrative support staff) in the quest to take brain research to the next level.

The project is in its launch phase now. Turk-Browne’s team will begin recruiting new faculty and enrolling students next, with the goal of moving into several floors of 100 College in fall 2022.

Turk-Browne discussed the project Wednesday during an interview on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” The questions, like those at the top of the story, proved the most interesting part of the discussion.

The institute is coming into being amid dramatic advances in big-data research, in artificial intelligence, in safe and ethical brain imaging and optogenetics, Turk-Browne said.

“It’s a really exciting time” to do this work, he said. ​“The study of the brain and the mind are at the root of who we are as humans. It’s how we interact with each other. It’s how we come up with ideas. …

“In the past, a biologist studied molecules, cells and genes. Or you study behavior. Or you study algorithms. All of those individual threads have made outstanding progress in recent decades. The time is right to bring them together.”

That research leads to practical questions — and potentially, answers — for how we live.

Research into how the brain works right can help identify how to treat, say, memory problems or epilepsy. Insights from brain research can lead to more effective teaching methods and school set-ups.

It can help the judicial system understand personal culpability for crimes.

It can help scientists and ethicists and policymakers navigate the incorporation of machines and artificial intelligence into our daily lives, what the limits should be as well as the opportunities.

Which leads to the question about the pope.

If you ask a computer the pope’s phone number, Turk-Browne pointed out, it searches databases until it concludes that it doesn’t know. A human brain will immediately conclude it doesn’t have the phone number. It doesn’t need to search.

Which means there may still be hope for us humans. There may be a role for human consciousness, after all.

Right, Siri?