Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki Read Free Book Online Page A

favorite Indian restaurant. Before digging in, take a few minutes to smell the food and try to really notice the different aromas and try to describe them. This will start to tune you in more to your olfactory senses.

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    SOLVING THE MYSTERIES OF MEMORY:
How Memories Are Formed and Retained
    A fter spending my senior year back at U.C. Berkeley in Diamond’s lab, I completed my senior thesis, which focused on examining the brain sizes of rat babies after placing rat mothers in enriched environments. I then graduated with high honors and I knew I wanted to go to graduate school and learn how to become a neuroscientist myself. My time in the Jaffard lab in Bordeaux had also piqued my interest in the brain basis of memory. After all, memory is one of the most common categories of brain plasticity. We know that every single time we learn something new, something in our brain changes. But for me, at the beginning of graduate school, the question was how does the brain change. I was also interested in another question: Could we find a way to visualize what was happening the moment something was learned?
    The many facets of memory intrigued me. In an intuitive way, I understood that when the brain learns something new, it must change. But where was this happening? What are the challenges to learning something new? And what did learning have to do with memory? My hunch was that all these questions had to do with how memories are structured and formed in the brain. When I was accepted into the graduate program for neuroscience at U.C. San Diego, I wanted to discover everything there was to know about memory; it turns out I was about to become involved in one of the most dramatic and far-reaching areas of neuroscience research.
    A SEISMIC SHIFT IN OUR UNDERSTANDING OF MEMORY AND THE BRAIN
    U.C. San Diego had a top-notch neuroscience faculty, including Larry Squire and Stuart Zola-Morgan, two neuroscientists whom I had first learned about in Jaffard’s course on memory. I didn’t know it the day I accepted the offer, but I was soon going to be in the eye of the firestorm over memory function that Jaffard had described in class.
    The late 1980s was an electric time to be studying memory. A gigantic memory mystery had emerged in the field centering on the question of a specific brain region that was really critical for memory. This mystery had actually started thirty years earlier, with the most famous amnesic patient ever studied, a man known as H.M.
    At the heart of this groundbreaking discovery in the 1950s was a neuroscientist named Brenda Milner, a Brit who got her degree at Cambridge University and was working at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Milner, an assistant professor at the time, had been working with the eminent neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who specialized in brain surgery for serious cases of epilepsy that did not respond to drug treatment. This surgical intervention involved removing the hippocampus and amygdala from the side of the brain where the specialists thought the seizures started. Milner was testing Penfield’s epilepsy patients before and after their brain surgery to see if removing the hippocampus and amygdala had any adverse effect on their brain function. She found mild memory impairment for spatial information if the right hippocampus was removed and mild verbal memory impairments if the left hippocampus was removed, but these deficits were considered acceptable given that the surgeries greatly reduced or eliminated the devastating epileptic seizures that these patients had been suffering for years before the operation.
    And then the team was absolutely flabbergasted when Penfield treated two new patients with the same brain surgery and got completely different results: After surgery, these patients showed profound and devastating memory deficits. Penfield and his colleagues had done more than a hundred similar operations with only mild memory impairments. They immediately wrote an abstract and