The recently launched brain initiatives [1] have thrown financial support behind one of the greatest intellectual challenges of our time: to develop an understanding of “how the brain works.” Physicists are expected to play a vital role in this research, and already have an impressive record of developing new tools for neuroscience. From two-photon microscopy [2] to magnetoencephalography [3], we can now record activity from individual synapses to entire brains in unprecedented detail. But physicists can do more than simply provide tools for data collection.
One of the great successes of physics is universality—the idea that at larger scales, some small-scale details can be ignored. For neuroscience, this is where physics could have its biggest impact, providing general principles of brain function. Ideally, these principles should come in the form of equations. However, there is skepticism from both sides (biology and physics) that this could really be achieved. The brain is a highly complex structure with tens of distinct neurotransmitters and receptors [4,5], a menagerie of cell types, and precise wiring patterns [6]. Can these small-scale details really be ignored? The answer looks like it might be yes, with glimmers of universality beginning to appear in neuroscience.
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