Ann Graybiel

First Person | Ann Graybiel Courtesy of MIT Talk to neuroscientist Ann Graybiel for a short period of time and she immediately generates certain impressions: The words tenacious, steadfast, and curious come to mind. Since 1971, Graybiel has stayed the course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying basal ganglia, discerning their architecture and describing their neurochemical organization. Known to the press as the woman who studies how behavior becomes habit, Graybiel is content where she is. "I haven't felt compelled to go someplace else. Right now, MIT is bursting with energy for neuroscience." With 200-plus papers to her credit, as well as the National Medal of Science, Graybiel also seems an ideal lab head: She declined to name her favorite papers, a standard question of this feature. She didn't want to offend any of her coworkers by choosing one over another. What questions were neuroscientists asking when you started? How do we see? How can we use language? What underlies emotions, feelings? What is the neural basis of thought and conscious awareness? Nearly all the questions that an interested layman would naturally ask, we wanted to answer but couldn't. Can you answer them now? We'll see, but surely it is with more powerful methods that we are trying. The questions have not changed; it is our increased temerity in trying to answer them! But technology has aided that temerity. We can finally begin to tackle some of the very deep questions about brain and behavior, because new methods are coming. Even a few years ago, if somebody said something about consciousness, then that was thought to be in the realm of philosophy or intelligent argumentation. Not very many people thought it was a subject that could be addressed with the highest level of scientific method. Along comes scanning the human brain in people who are awake. They can now say what happens in brain when [one is] thinking about someone they like, or flowers. Give us an example of the methods. Before, with 1013 neurons--take that as a ballpark number--you had one probe that could analyze two, three neurons at a time. Now people are using many probes at the same time. There are chemical probes and markers that begin to open things up. So you can say that a neurotransmitter works like x or y in that neuron. What are you working on now? One [area of study] is how we organize doing a whole behavior. If you want to have a sip of coffee, you have to get the coffee, get the cup. We are interested in how that sequencing goes and how that interacts with what you want. In animal work, we are trying to tackle that in various ways. Some of the mice are engineered so that we can study the effects of particular molecules. For example, we are looking at the molecule implicated in Parkinson disease, a synuclein. We've cloned some genes that we think are interesting in connection with disease ... and we have our first [engineered mouse]; postdoc Jill Crittenden did it. We want to find out what [that molecule deletion] does to behavior. We are finding significant abnormalities. Many of your papers have few authors listed. Do you like working in small groups? It's the nature of the work. In the past, one or two people could go after a problem ... some famous neuroscientists built their own equipment. Now, because most projects are so technically demanding, it takes more than one method. So the style, bit by bit, is changing. It's a little bit less scientists in an ivory tower and a little bit more teamwork, and that is utterly the case for anything related to diseases. What are your nonscientific interests? First of all there is doing: I like sports, tennis, and biking, tramping through the woods. I love physical exercise; it's just a pleasure. I love music, and people. I like to cook. What is one thing nobody knows about you? I wouldn't tell you. You feel that humans have enormous undeveloped brain potential. Any idea how much we use now? I couldn't put a figure to it really. I don't think we even know how terrific we could be if we could summon our courage and our capacity. I am utterly fascinated: Why don't we? Is it a question of 'can we?' What is considered unsolvable? Ultimately, most of us feel we have a long way to go before we can understand the link between brain activity and mental activity--conscious mental activity .... [For example], you are talking with me, and you are typing, but how you jump from that to little molecules doing their little thing in your brain tissue is a big, big, big jump. I don't think we know how to approach that question yet. It's weird, even if we could say we knew everything that was going on in every little nerve cell, every little spike, how would you go from that list of brain activity to that other realm? Will you know the answer in your lifetime? No ... [but] I want to. function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

Ann Graybiel

The Scientist Staff

First Person | Ann Graybiel

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