Dave Sulzer: Impossible Questions

(graphic whooshes) (gentle music) - Sometimes neuroscientists ask impossible questions.

How does our body work?

How does our mind work?

We can't really ask exactly that question, but we can begin to ask little building blocks of that question.

My laboratory looks at how brain cells speak to each other.

One of the questions in neuroscience for a long time had been what is the single basic unit of neurotransmission?

Great work in the 1940s by Bernard Katz showed that there's tiny packets of neurotransmitter release that he called quanta.

These individual tiny events, it's like matters made from atoms.

Neurotransmission is made from these tiny packet's neurotransmitter.

When I first started my laboratory, one day we decided to use a new recording technique.

And one day we saw quanta.

We saw the first direct recording of quanta that's ever been seen.

We thought theoretically, it could happen, but we didn't really believe it could happen.

And I was so excited watching that data, that I had to lie down on the floor.

I couldn't believe that something that people had hypothesized for so long actually existed, and we could see it.

The sensation was we've just seen something so fundamental, something that every animal does all the time for everything it does.

If it's done with the nervous system, it's done in this way.

It was astonishing.

It was like a great gift.

A few minutes later, we realized now we can share it.

We can show it to other people.

(gentle music)