The Allen Institute’s OpenScope program lets scientists study the bizarre workings of the brain — for example, how magic mushrooms exert their psychedelic effects on individual neurons, how memories of the past influence present perceptions, and how the brain’s visual system interprets motion and texture.
One of the program’s leaders, neuroscientist Jerome Lecoq, is particularly excited about an experiment that is still in the planning stages. This study could support a theory about how sensory data is fed into our consciousness to modify our worldview and potentially our behavior as well.
The experiment is being refined online by an international community of researchers through an open-source process referred to by the Seattle-based Allen Institute as a “brainstorm.”
“You can just go and follow us on Twitter and visit the Google Doc,” Lecoq mentions in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “We’re going to meet in two and a half weeks in Boston at a conference and discuss this experiment. The document is very open. If you have a good idea, please share it.”
For centuries, scientists have been trying to figure out how the brain works — and for decades, authors and filmmakers have been exploring the mysteries of consciousness in works such as Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” and the movie “Altered States.” A psychoactive drug plays a fictional role in Apple TV+’s recent sci-fi thriller “Dark Matter,” helping its users cope with the strangeness of jumping between alternate universes.
There’s nothing odd about the experiments being conducted at the Allen Institute’s Brain Observatory. The institute’s late founder, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Paul Allen, created the Brain Observatory to play the same role in neuroscience that the Hubble Space Telescope plays in astronomy, or that the Large Hadron Collider plays in physics.
The Allen Brain Observatory examines how thousands of neurons across the mouse brain respond to stimuli, most often concerning the brain’s visual system. One of its best-known (and arguably craziest) experiments involved having mice watch the first three minutes of Orson Welles’ film-noir classic, “Touch of Evil,” to understand how their brain cells processed the moving images.
Each year, the Allen Institute solicits external proposals for research leveraging the Brain Observatory’s tools. The OpenScope process follows the model used for reserving research time on the LHC and the Hubble Space Telescope (and the James Webb Space Telescope as well).
“We thought that moving forward, it will be really impactful if scientists across the community could propose projects — essentially creating a marketplace of ideas, where neuroscientists globally could present their ideas,” Lecoq says. “Then we run the experiment with them and make the dataset available to the broader community in the same way.”
The experiments are supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
This year’s brainstorm project incorporates a crowdsourcing element into the usual process. The planned experiment focuses on a theory of brain function known as predictive coding.
The theory posits that the brain is continually generating and updating a mental model of the environment, processing sensory inputs to identify and correct errors in that model. “I would say predictive coding is likely what feeds your consciousness,” Lecoq explains.
However, the specifics of the error-correcting process remain elusive. “The question in that theory is, where is the error calculated in the brain? Which neurons are involved in this computation?” says Lecoq.
Researchers are contributing online to a nearly 40-page document outlining potential experiments to answer that question. “There are six experiments already laid out,” Lecoq says. “We’ll see where that leads. Eventually, we will have a poll throughout the community to identify the most impactful experiments, and we’ll run them.”
This predictive coding experiment isn’t the only initiative on this year’s OpenScope agenda. Four other research projects have been selected to utilize the Allen Brain Observatory’s data-gathering mechanisms:
What makes cells go psychedelic? A project led by researchers at Humboldt University of Berlin will examine how psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, alters neuron activity in living mice. One of the project leaders, Roberto de Filippo, mentioned in a news release that the experiment could provide “fundamental insights into the processes governing perception, cognition, and consciousness itself.”
Studies have shown that psilocybin can counter medication-resistant depression and anxiety, and Lecoq suggests that the OpenScope study could propose ways to fine-tune psychedelic drugs for clinical applications. “We hope that we can identify which cell types are impacted and better understand how this drug works, perhaps to design more targeted therapeutic substances in the future,” he adds.
How does the past shape our present worldview? Researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science aim to analyze brain activity in mice to understand how the brain’s visual system reacts over time. Inspired by the Allen Brain Observatory’s movie-watching mice study, they are designing an experiment where a movie transitions from start to end, with context changes midway, to examine if mice can learn and anticipate these changes.
How does the brain track moving objects? Researchers from the University of Freiburg and the Technical University of Berlin will study how mouse brains process visual data to perceive motion. They are particularly interested in how neural circuits handle conflicting motion data. “If something moves rapidly toward you, your brain will likely notice it immediately due to its different speed, which is crucial for survival,” Lecoq states.
How do we recognize textures by sight alone? Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary will use the Allen Brain Observatory to investigate the role the visual cortex plays in interpreting the appearance of different textures. This study seeks to understand how visual cues help us distinguish between subcategories of objects, like different apple varieties or dog breeds. “That’s what this project is about,” Lecoq says. “How does the brain disentangle object representations as we learn?”
Six years after OpenScope opened for business, Lecoq notes that the program reflects a new model for neuroscience: “Our platform enhances data acquisition and global sharing, while empowering individual labs to utilize it for their unique scientific pursuits,” he says.
This demonstrates how OpenScope follows the open-science approach that Paul Allen championed over a decade ago. “This is our vision for the future of neuroscience,” Lecoq asserts.
Jerome Lecoq co-leads the OpenScope program alongside Christof Koch, a fellow neuroscientist at the Allen Institute. Koch was a featured guest on the Fiction Science podcast in 2021, discussing his psychedelic experiences and what they reveal about the nature of consciousness. If you haven’t heard that podcast yet, check it out.
For additional reading recommendations from Jerome Lecoq and future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast, visit the original version of this item on Cosmic Log. Stay tuned via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, and Podchaser. If you enjoy Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe for alerts about upcoming episodes.
