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piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
A Maverick Scientist Is Upending Everything We Thought We Knew About Memory
Rare is a long-read that gives us a peek into a scientist’s persona as well as his work. This article, written with much flair by Elizabeth Svoboda, takes us into the Picower Institute of Learning and Memory at MIT to understand the phenomenal work that Nobel Laureate and maverick scientist Susumu Tonegawa is doing to understand the complexities of memory.
It also gives us an insightful glimpse into how a famous neuroscientist sees himself, how he does up his workspace and what banter he indulges in with his colleagues.
In fact, it has been a great year for brain research, with neuroscientists gaining several new insights — including how our brain keeps multiple copies of our memories and ‘hides’ the long-term copy from us.
Tonegawa, along with his colleagues, has been overturning long-held assumptions about brain science for a while now. For decades, neuroscientists believed short-term memories that are formed in the hippocampus are later transferred to long-term storage in the pre-frontal cortex. But Tonegawa's team recently validated how, in fact, memories form at both locations at the same time.
Having got his Nobel Prize way back in 1987 for his work on Immunology, Tonegawa later turned his attention to brain science, completely reinventing himself in the next two decades. Using optogenetics to generate neural activity, he and his colleagues demonstrated earlier this year that most existing assumptions about memory formation and storage were wrong — the neural circuit that stores a memory is the not the same as the one that recalls it. Crucially, Tonegawa is also reassessing how our memories are formed.
Recently, the scientist has controversially asserted that brains contains ‘silent engrams’ that could be activated (thus gaining access to hidden memories). For many, this sounds too sci-fi. But Tonegawa, the contrarian, believes if he is successful in this research, it might bring about transformative change for patients with cognitive difficulties.
