No More Brains

Friday was my last day of work at the Gazzaley Neuroscience Laboratory at UC San Francisco. I had worked with Dr. Adam Gazzaley for about 3.5 years--2 at Berkeley and 1.5 at UCSF. It was really a fantastic time, and certainly ignited a fire under my butt for research. Adam was good enough to give me plenty of opportunities to be creative with my experiments, data analysis, and data presentation. I've spent the last couple months trying to wrap up my experiments, passing my data along to other researchers who will take over my projects, preparing to present at a conference in November, and writing a research article that will (hopefully) be submitted in the near future--not to mention preparing to move to San Diego and begin medical school.

I'm really gonna miss the work. You know, doing research can be a horribly frustrating thing--but it is soooo addictive. It's like when you're playing a video game and you're at the end of the level and keep dying--you have to keep trying until you beat it--and then once you do you realize there's another level--it's never-ending.

Our lab studies memory, attention, and aging. We use several neurophysiological techiques (techniques that look at, record, and perturb brain activity: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation(TMS)) to study how the brain processes involved in memory and attention function and change with age. We use human subjects (no rats or monkeys). Most of our experiments include two age populations--a young group (18-35 yrs.), and an old group (60-80 yrs.). Then we compare the neural activities associated with memory and attention between the two groups in order to 1) better understand the brain networks and regions that are involved, and 2) understand how these networks change, degrade, and compensate with age. The idea is, once we understand it, we can better treat it. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years. School starts next week in San Diego and a whole new chapter begins--I'm really excited. But I'm gonna miss the old chapter too.

Lindsay has been a research subject for me a few times:

EEG--72 electrodes measure and record electrical brain activity

fMRI--going into the MRI scanner


our brains:
Lindsay (press play)

This is a 3D rendering (the weird lines around the ears are where she was wearing headphones)

Aaron (press play)


an example of functional data from an fMRI scan:
the colors represent relative activity in these brain regions while performing a specific task in the scanner.