The Secrets of How Our Brains Works with Prof. Dr. Ege Taner Kavalali

The seminar started with the opening speech made by Cigdem Guven, and then Prof. Dr. Ege Taner Kavalalı talked about his educational career. He met the biomedical field while preparing the senior design project in Bogazici University Electrical and Electronics Engineering and he pursued this field by entering Rutgers University to complete his doctorate. While continuing his academic career as a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, he received a job offer from the University of Texas and he continued his studies at the Medical Center of University of Texas.

Prof. Dr. Ege Taner Kavalalı continued his presentation by explaining how the synapses are functioning, how our memory is shaped and how each function of our brain is realized. Than the seminar go on with analyzing the working mechanisms of billions of synapses, which are effective in the formation of neural networks with each other in our central nervous system, and also it was mentioned that information extracted from this area sheds light on the unknowns of the functioning of our bodies.

The seminar continued with explaining the mechanism of the communication between the neurons by the synapses. The enormous number of synapses found in our brain and the variation of this number in relation to the age were pointed out. Prof. Dr. Ege Taner Kavalalı said that “A newborn person has 10,000 trillion synapses, and this number decreases inversely with age increase and stabilizes in adults. This decrease in the number of synapses should not be considered as a loss unlike what is known. One of the ways in which the brain develops itself is to program the brain by tearing off synapses.”

Prof. Dr. Ege Taner Kavalalı stated that our daily activities, our mood changes and everything we face during the day affects our brain and synapses and it changes the structure. Neuroscience is a relatively new science field and there are many more studies that need to be done in this area. Explaining how our brain works is one of the biggest problems that human beings face.