Brain diseases are often sources of shame for people who have them. Understanding that such diseases are bodily afflictions is key to finding a better cure
Mriganka Sur is the Paul E. Newton Professor of Neuroscience, Head, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Director of the Simons Initiative on Autism and the Brain at MIT. He studies the organisation, development and plasticity of the cerebral cortex of the brain using experimental and theoretical approaches. He has discovered fundamental principles by which networks of the cerebral cortex are wired during development and change dynamically during learning. Recently, his group demonstrated novel mechanisms underlying disorders of brain development, and proposed innovative strategies for treating such disorders.
I have been fascinated by the human brain from my student days, even though all my training has been in electrical engineering — first during my undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur in 1974 and then during graduate studies in the US. Everything starts with the brain: Our ways of thinking, our understanding of the world, and for that matter, our ways of changing the world. So understanding the brain will not only help us treat brain disorders and build intelligent machines but also enable us to grasp and change the human condition.
Here, I will try to distill what I have learnt as a brain scientist into one key idea that I believe is truly important for change that can be transformative and impactful.
This idea is disruption.
What do I mean by this? Disruption, or a radical change that breaks from the past, is critically important for a society and for science and technology to leap forward. I believe that change is overwhelmingly incremental or gradual because that is the kind of change encouraged by systems. Systems of people, of science and of organisations are about gradualness.
Yet the problems that confront us are not going to be solved fundamentally that way. And this is all the more true in the developing world. The West has advanced to where it has by exponential change, if you will, including many disruptive changes in its centuries of development. In the developing world, we seek to emulate the same goals and trajectory but we know that sequence cannot be repeated. For instance, we cannot have the same kind of consumptive development and hope to build a sustainable future.
There has to be a disruption in the way we think about development, or science and technology, or even progress. There are many challenges of our time such as social inequality, economic inequality and inequality in terms of access to resources like energy or water. These problems cannot be solved without massive disruptive change in the way we approach them.
(This story appears in the 04 June, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)