Read Online Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki - Free Book Online
Authors: Wendy Suzuki
Ads: Link
Adventures in Good Music was followed by the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday matinee, which broadcasts operas in their entirety. I should have gotten an additional PhD in classical music appreciation with all the hours I spent listening to these programs during graduate school. I had no human company during the time I spent in that dark room, but at least I had the music.
What did all this work tell me? It turns out that the cortical areas in the medial temporal lobe I studied, called the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortex, provide massive input into the hippocampus via a structure called the entorhinal cortex. In addition, my studies showed that these cortical areas are a major brain interface, or “gateway,” receiving input from a wide range of brain areas involved in all kinds of sensory functions and other higher-level brain areas important for things like reward, attention, and cognition. Far from being simple visual areas, as researchers had previously thought, these regions are where high-level information converges in the brain. While I used relatively old-fashioned research approaches, my work revealed new information about why these brain areas might be so important for memory. Their connections were the key.
But just characterizing the connections of this region could not tell us exactly what its functions are. I went on to show that damage limited to these mystery cortical areas in animals causes devastating memory impairment that is similar in severity to the magnitude of impairment seen in H.M. This was another shocking finding. All the attention on memory research so far had been focused on the hippocampus and the amygdala. These new studies showed that neuroscience had been missing a key player in the game all along—the cortical areas that surround the hippocampus and amygdala. It was also clear that just because we implicated selective cortical areas important for memory, that did not mean that Lashley was vindicated. He had proposed that memory emerges from a complex interaction from widespread cortical areas across the brain and that no single area can underlie memory function. My findings showed that, in fact, you can identify specific and highly interconnected areas critical to the ability to form new long-term memories: specifically, the hippocampus and the cortical areas that immediately surround these structures. While Lashley was wrong about the localization of brain areas important for the formation of new memory, his ideas about the importance of large networks of brain areas did foreshadow findings that long-term memories can be stored in the same widespread cortical networks that process the incoming information in the first place.
My graduate studies helped identify two new brain areas and showed exactly how important they are for long-term memory function. In addition, the studies also pointed to another brain area, sitting between the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices and the hippocampus, called the entorhinal cortex. Research shows that this area also plays a big part in the system of brain areas critical for declarative memory. Indeed, the recent Nobel Prize in Science or Medicine was awarded to two colleagues from Norway who characterized a major function of the entorhinal cortex in the processing of spatial information.
The U.C. San Diego research team and I hypothesized that patient H.M.’s severe memory impairment had to have been due to the damage both of the hippocampus and of these surrounding cortical areas. And sure enough, as soon I completed researching and writing my thesis, a brain scan was taken of H.M., which allowed researchers to visualize for the first time the true extent of his brain damage. This historic MRI scan (this is a technique that allows brain structure, including differentiating white matter, or axons, from gray matter, or cell bodies, to be visualized) confirmed that H.M. did sustain damage: not only to the hippocampus and amygdala but also to
What did all this work tell me? It turns out that the cortical areas in the medial temporal lobe I studied, called the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortex, provide massive input into the hippocampus via a structure called the entorhinal cortex. In addition, my studies showed that these cortical areas are a major brain interface, or “gateway,” receiving input from a wide range of brain areas involved in all kinds of sensory functions and other higher-level brain areas important for things like reward, attention, and cognition. Far from being simple visual areas, as researchers had previously thought, these regions are where high-level information converges in the brain. While I used relatively old-fashioned research approaches, my work revealed new information about why these brain areas might be so important for memory. Their connections were the key.
But just characterizing the connections of this region could not tell us exactly what its functions are. I went on to show that damage limited to these mystery cortical areas in animals causes devastating memory impairment that is similar in severity to the magnitude of impairment seen in H.M. This was another shocking finding. All the attention on memory research so far had been focused on the hippocampus and the amygdala. These new studies showed that neuroscience had been missing a key player in the game all along—the cortical areas that surround the hippocampus and amygdala. It was also clear that just because we implicated selective cortical areas important for memory, that did not mean that Lashley was vindicated. He had proposed that memory emerges from a complex interaction from widespread cortical areas across the brain and that no single area can underlie memory function. My findings showed that, in fact, you can identify specific and highly interconnected areas critical to the ability to form new long-term memories: specifically, the hippocampus and the cortical areas that immediately surround these structures. While Lashley was wrong about the localization of brain areas important for the formation of new memory, his ideas about the importance of large networks of brain areas did foreshadow findings that long-term memories can be stored in the same widespread cortical networks that process the incoming information in the first place.
My graduate studies helped identify two new brain areas and showed exactly how important they are for long-term memory function. In addition, the studies also pointed to another brain area, sitting between the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices and the hippocampus, called the entorhinal cortex. Research shows that this area also plays a big part in the system of brain areas critical for declarative memory. Indeed, the recent Nobel Prize in Science or Medicine was awarded to two colleagues from Norway who characterized a major function of the entorhinal cortex in the processing of spatial information.
The U.C. San Diego research team and I hypothesized that patient H.M.’s severe memory impairment had to have been due to the damage both of the hippocampus and of these surrounding cortical areas. And sure enough, as soon I completed researching and writing my thesis, a brain scan was taken of H.M., which allowed researchers to visualize for the first time the true extent of his brain damage. This historic MRI scan (this is a technique that allows brain structure, including differentiating white matter, or axons, from gray matter, or cell bodies, to be visualized) confirmed that H.M. did sustain damage: not only to the hippocampus and amygdala but also to
Similar Books
