Optogenetics and Modern Neurotechnology: Illuminating the Mysteries of the Brain

What are the neural circuits that underpin behavior, both in psychiatric illness and in health? Can we understand what is going on in the brain of a person suffering depression, or who has an anxiety disorder, or is addicted to drugs? And what of our fundamental functions and survival drives: what are the connections between neurons that enable us to form, store, and retrieve memories, to feel empathy, to act as parents to our children? In the early years of the twenty-first century, a new technology in neuroscience has emerged to unveil the causal relationship between the activity of specific neurons and the behaviors they control. That technology is called optogenetics. Optogenetics is a combination of optics and genetics to control well-defined events within specific cells of living tissue, the better to understand the mechanistic origins of those events.