Are We Wired to Be Outside?
Nautilus. Issue 92: Frontiers. 2020
Hiking the Franconia Ridge Loop is an intimidating proposition. The trail, in the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, is close to 9 miles long, and peaks at over 5,000 feet above sea level. The ridge connects several of New Hampshire’s highest peaks and offers stunning views of the surrounding mountains. The ridge itself is a ragged, narrow path flanked by alpine tundra, with low-standing bushes and virtually no trees…
Image courtesy of Jeff Lichtman
An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
Nautilus. Issue 81: Maps. 2020
On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s campus. As a purplish-red sun set, I sat brooding over my dataset on rat brains. I thought of the cold windowless rooms in downtown Boston, home to Harvard’s high-performance computing center, where computer servers were holding on to a precious 48 terabytes of my data. I have recorded the 13 trillion numbers in this dataset as part of my Ph.D. experiments, asking how the visual parts of the rat brain respond to movement…
Are Animal Experiments Justified?
Nautilus. Issue 72: Quandary. 2019
The rat sat still in the middle of her cage, moving only in response to my touch, and even then only as if in slow-motion. My subject, GRat66, was a few months old, and except for her long bare tail, fit neatly into my palm a few minutes earlier, when I injected a few drops of a potent opiate under her skin, near the belly. Now, her beady black eyes bulged as she faded into an opiate stupor…
Photograph by Sean McCann
Why Neuroscientists Need to Study the Crow
Nautilus. Issue 40: Learning. 2016
The animals of neuroscience research are an eclectic bunch, and for good reason. Different model organisms—like zebra fish larvae, C. elegans worms, fruit flies, and mice—give researchers the opportunity to answer specific questions. The first two, for example, have transparent bodies, which let scientists easily peer into their brains; the last two have eminently tweakable genomes, which allow scientists to isolate the effects of specific genes. For cognition studies, researchers have relied largely on primates and, more recently, rats, which I use in my own work. But the time is ripe for this exclusive club of research animals to accept a new, avian member: the corvid family...
Image by Brian Chow
inception helps mice navigate
Science in the News. 2015
For decades, we have known that specialized neurons in the hippocampus of rodents called place cells reflect the animals’ location in space. Meanwhile, studies have also implicated the hippocampus in supporting memory formation. Could there be a link between the two seemingly detached functions? Yes! says the latest neurobiology research, showing that place cells not only encode an animal’s current location but also their memory for that location…
Image from Istockphoto/Thinkstock
WORK/LIFE BALANCE: GET INSPIRATION
Naturejobs Blog. 2015.
About a year after graduating from college, I interviewed for a lab technician position with a postdoc who was gearing up to start his own lab. Chatting in Cambridge’s hipster Area Four coffee shop on a disappointingly freezing March day, I was trying to assess what kind of lab environment I should expect. After all, a highly competitive top-notch institution such as his was notorious for producing overworked, stressed people. “I work about one hundred hours in the lab every week,” he said, “plus another twenty in the clinic. And I have a kid at home.” Noticing my incredulous expression, he added, “science does not wait.”
Photograph by Ben Gebo
The neuroscience society
Colloquy. 2014
Despite the recent media frenzy about all things neuro, from neurolaw to neuromarketing and brain games, drinks, and apps, most neuroscience research today is conducted with the ultimate goal of curing brain diseases, which take a great economic and emotional toll on our society. Curing disease is of paramount importance, but it may turn out to be one of the simpler endeavors of future neuroscience. Understanding how the brain works might be the more complicated part. And to really understand something, you have to build it.