As a kid growing up in the greater Philadelphia area, Megan Carey was always fascinated by optical illusions and other brain puzzles. “I remember as a child wondering whether other people saw colors the same way that I saw colors,” she says. After flirting with the idea of majoring in physics, she ended up in the lab of neuroscientist David Bodznick at Wesleyan University, where she studied how skates—fish relatives of rays and sharks—could differentiate between electrical signals produced by nearby prey and those produced by their own movements. She found that, through repeated associations, skates’ neurons learned to tell the difference between self-generated electrical fields and similar signals coming from the outside world.
“Studying that system got me interested in simple forms of learning,” she says.
METHODS: As a PhD student in Stephen Lisberger’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, Carey continued to probe how neurons process ...
