Spring 2004
Neuroscience meets the liberal arts
Photo by Terry Faust
What makes us human, and what makes life vital and so worth living, is our ability not only to see, taste, smell, hear, touch, and move, but also to think, feel, imagine, remember, understand, empathize, express ourselves, and learn. It is our brain that makes all these deeply human processes possible—the pleasure and pain, anxiety and anticipation, fear and joy that fill our everyday lives.
How does the brain enable all these sensations and functions? What happens when disease, degeneration, damage, or disorders set in? How do these occurrences disrupt the usual functioning of the brain and how can they be treated or repaired?
CLA's neuroscientists ask and explore such questions, and their pioneering work is the focus of this issue of CLA Today. Neuroscience—the study of the neural basis of human perception, cognition, emotion, and behavior—is one of a handful of academic initiatives that President Bob Bruininks has identified as University priorities over the next several years.
CLA is a major player in these presidential initiatives. (Two others—the environment and the arts and humanities—will be the focus of future issues of CLA Today.)
The neuroscience initiative is a cutting-edge, University-wide, interdisciplinary collaboration designed to advance dramatically our understanding of the brain and its functions.
Put simply, the initiative will help us understand how our brains develop, how they work, and how we can keep them functioning at peak levels or restore them to full or partial function and health when something goes wrong.
Plumbing the depths
As our central processing units, our brains regulate everything from breathing to seeing, from digestion to mood, from walking to making a soufflé, composing a symphony, writing a story, or designing a spacecraft.
When something goes wrong, the results can range from mildly distressing to devastating.
Working with researchers from the health sciences, education, and other academic disciplines, CLA neuroscientists are investigating at the molecular as well as behavioral levels both how the "normal" brain works and how it can go awry. They are learning what happens when the brain is functioning well—when we're learning, remembering, speaking intelligibly, feeling good, seeing and hearing sharply, or performing dexterously—and also when it takes a wrong turn, whether from traumatic injury, genetic accidents, disease, or causes unknown.
The research of CLA scientists will lay the foundations for revolutionary innovations in education and health care, and will have profound implications for human health across the lifespan. It promises to enable diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of such disorders as dementia, autism, mental illness, disorders of speech, and hearing and vision loss. And it will give us the information we need to develop new strategies for educating both "normal" and developmentally disabled or brain-injured children and adults, and for knowing how and when to intervene when learning goes awry.
The liberal arts & science
You might be saying to yourself, "He's got to be kidding. CLA doing neuroscience research?" Yep, that's right.
It's fairly common for people to forget that for decades, CLA scientists, who are some of the University's most prominent researchers, have been engaged in the basic research needed to advance the scientific understanding of how our brains work.
Their work may not be mediagenic enough to capture broadcast headlines, but it is transforming our understanding of why, and how, we are who we are and do what we do. And this understanding is essential to the development of new treatments and applications.
This is nothing new, of course. Members of the faculty throughout CLA are committed to advancing the scientific understanding of how people, communities, economies, cities, and nations interact with each other and with their physical and biological environment. They are helping us understand the critical challenges we confront individually and collectively.
These challenges range from global warming to global economic instability; from traffic congestion to public safety and community development; and from family dysfunction and mental illness to developmental disabilities and vision and hearing loss.
Mapping the neuro-landscape
We all look routinely at maps to find routes to geographic destinations, check the weather, and watch states turn blue or red on election night. Using human functional neuroimaging—brain mapping, for short—neuroscientists are finding the way to such destinations as rehabilitation from traumatic brain injury and treatments for the ravages of Alzheimer's. They are revealing more than we ever knew before about the brain's topography, its storms and calms, its neural pathways, and its "wiring."
For most of us, the brain is just there, quietly going about its business. We rely on it for everything from recognizing each other to solving complex problems, and yet we are hardly aware of it at all until it misplaces a familiar word or name; scrambles words or images; refuses to supply a PIN at the cash machine; or even misfires in ways that cause notable disruptions such as seizures or memory loss.
For neuroscientists, thinking about the brain is all in a day's work. These researchers and their students are probing and scanning the brain to demystify its inner workings. They are learning what our brain is up to when we see a sunset or startle at the sound of a thunderclap; when we recognize colors and shapes or a human voice or face; when we translate perceived danger into fight or flight; and when we remember (or forget) names and numbers, or learn to play piano or tie a shoe.
In short, neuroscientists are bringing us closer to understanding the physiology behind what it is to be human.
CLA is on the leading edge of neuroscience research, and much of the pioneering research occurs in two of our most esteemed departments—psychology and speech-language-hearing sciences. The faculty profiled in this issue are just a very few of the many CLA researchers who are looking deep into the brain to better understand what makes us tick.
Stay tuned. You'll be hearing a lot more about the pathbreaking work of our CLA scientists.