05/10/2026
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery — always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”
These are Virginia Woolf’s words in a letter to a friend in 1932. Many people share her fascination with the brain. How can this organ, which only weighs around 1.3 kilograms, hold childhood memories, daydreams and creativity? How can it be the cause of joy, love and jealousy? How does it control the pace of heartbeats, the rhythm of breathing and the sleep cycle?
Since ancient times, researchers have attempted to understand this biological mystery. In the twentieth century, they successfully identified which regions of the brain govern various physiological functions. This provided invaluable understanding, but the methods available at the time were relatively blunt and could not prove that a specific type of nerve cell directly caused a certain feeling or behaviour. The image of the brain that emerged was therefore like a blurry photograph, missing many details.
To understand how the brain forms memories, feelings and behaviours has long been a dream for researchers. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries leading to optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain. This method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3T6a8f7
