Question: What would you like your biggest scientific discovery to be and why?

Hannah Brotherton answered on 24 Jun 2013:

Hi marden,
If I wasn’t studying the brain and ears and I went down a different route in brain science, I would have loved to discovery what makes our souls…..

Have you ever thought what makes us who we are? How are we made – our personalities, our thoughts, our souls.

People have researched how we can see, how we can smell, how we can remember things, but it is so hard to try and investigate how our souls are made.

If I could find out where our souls come from and why we think the way we do, then maybe this could answer our existence on earth and the meaning of life.

But this will never be answered, I don’t think because it is so hard to measure our souls. You can measure smell by using questionnaires and see activity in the brain when you smell something. But if our soul is us, everything about us, then how could you activate it?? and see where it is happening in the brain?

Maybe one day we can create a piece of equipment that could answer this question.

But in my PhD, to do with ears and brain, I want my biggest discovery to be knowing what causes our brain to hear ringing. We think it is caused by a mechanism that is involved with “fixing” the brain after damage to the ears. So if I find out what this mechanism is, where it happens, how it happens, then I can treat ringing in the ears, which is really upsetting for those that suffer from it. But this mechanism is likely to happen in other hearing problems and even in other parts of the brain like vision. So if I can understand this mechanism perfectly, then I could end up treating a lot of problems that involve the brain.

I could end up helping a lot of people in the world, which is the greatest gift a scientist can give to the world.

😀