Spring 2004
Photo by Leo Kim
Monica Luciana
Associate professor, psychology
Education
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
B.A., Boston College
Early years
Born in Ohio; raised in Tennessee and Connecticut
What makes research worthwhile
The ability to indulge her intellectual curiosity and generate information that will be helpful to others.
A real trooper because she…
Started graduate school when her daughter was 18 months old; gave birth to her son in her second year of graduate school.
She struggles to…
Integrate scholarly life and family life.
If not a professor, then she'd be…
A fiction writer or visual artist.
For fun, she…
Reads mystery novels (favorite author: Dennis Lehane), cooks Italian food.
Her colleagues say...
"Monica has more than the usual amount of empathy for kids and their problems, including those with severe neuropsychological challenges."
Drawing on the Brain
Monica Luciana studies the brain to discover how emotion, thinking, and perception enable or derail working memory and functional behavior.
A longing to capture human emotion in a few skillful strokes of pen or paintbrush still tugs at Monica Luciana, who abandoned thoughts of a career in visual art when she realized its economic realities. Instead, she is painting a different picture, one that reveals the invisible hand of brain chemicals in the genesis of emotion, perception, thinking, and all the other attributes that shape the human mind.
"Experience can affect people, but it acts on a nervous system that includes neurons and brain chemicals," says Luciana, an associate professor of clinical psychology. "My major goal is to address how it is that the specific neurochemical systems develop from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood, how they function in healthy people, and how they might be disrupted in clinical disorders.
"Brain chemicals allow most of our behavior to occur, and they are present in all brain regions. The biggest challenge is to understand how integration is achieved across the cognitive (thinking), motivational, and perceptual brain systems that help us function adaptively."
The brain resembles a factory that receives input from the senses and produces output in the form of behavior, says Luciana. In between, the brain generates memories, thoughts, moods, and emotions. The top floor of the factory—the prefrontal cortex, or PFC—intrigues Luciana. The PFC plays a major role in working memory, the kind you use to set and work toward goals. It can be as simple as holding the concept of "car keys" as you search your house for them or as complex as keeping track of all the plays in a poker game. The PFC allows information to be integrated and emotionally controlled so you can accomplish goals.
But the PFC may not reach full development until the age of 20 or later, says Luciana, noting that for adolescents, more than for adults, the ability to use information in working memory can be derailed by emotions, especially if the desire for rewards comes into play. In other words, there's a reason why teens' heads are so often ruled by their hearts.
An immature PFC may explain why, for example, a teen who knows better than to drink and drive may still do so when an adult might not, Luciana says. To address such discrepancies, Luciana is seeking to understand how this part of the brain matures. In collaboration with psychiatry professors Kelvin Lim and Tonya White, she studies behavioral development in the frontal cortex, how its structure changes over time, and how genes that govern the transmission of neurochemical signals interact with these processes.
A graduate of Boston College, Luciana worked at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., as an assistant in a depression research project before going to graduate school. From encounters with people suffering from psychopathology, she learned that patients' experiences couldn't fully explain their conditions; there often seemed to be a trigger—something wrong in their brain chemistry.
Prozac was then being tested in clinical trials, and Luciana wondered about the neural bases for the drug's successes. After three years at McLean, Luciana came to the University's clinical psychology graduate program, where her training emphasized the biological bases of reward-seeking behavior.
One thing she has looked at is how behavior can go awry from disruptions in the brain chemicals dopamine and serotonin, which allow PFC neurons to communicate with each other. To uncover their exact roles in working memory, Luciana has studied people with phenylketonuria (PKU), a genetic condition that might have adverse effects on dopamine function, and users of the "designer drug" Ecstasy, which is believed to disrupt serotonin-based nerve functions.
PKU patients, she found, often have impairments in several aspects of their working memory. And Ecstasy users frequently experience deficits in their verbal memory—such as remembering something they have just read—and in working memory. Yet many keep taking the drug.
Why do people persist in destructive behavior? "I think people who keep using any drug are doing so for compelling emotional reasons," Luciana says. "I think those reasons are neurochemically motivated but different from the reason someone gets depressed or anxious.
"With more work, I hope we can understand how a brain chemical such as serotonin functions differently in, for example, a depressed person versus an Ecstasy user."
Such questions go to the heart of Luciana's commitment to developing a better understanding of how brains mature and how our thinking, emotions, and behavior are affected by both by the brain's own chemistry and by manufactured chemicals.
The challenge is "daunting in its complexity," says Luciana, but also irresistible.