Dr. Endel Tulving

Dr. Endel Tulving is considered by many to be the single scientist who has had the greatest impact on our understanding of human memory. An international luminary in experimental psychology, Dr. Tulving’s theories on the brain’s multiple memory systems have laid the foundation for the entire field of memory research. Best known for his findings on “episodic” memory – or the memory of personal experiences and specific events in time – Dr. Tulving has not only advanced the theoretical understanding of memory, but has had a tremendous influence on the research of neurological disorders such as stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. In 2010, Dr. Tulving retired from Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute, but his influence continues to be felt, both at Baycrest, and throughout the fields of cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry and clinical neurology. Dr. Tulving has been elected to six national academies of science worldwide, has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gairdner Award in 2005, and in 2006 was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Dr. Fergus Craik

One of the world’s most renowned psychologists, Dr. Fergus Craik has contributed immensely to the understanding of human memory. For more than four decades, his research has been instrumental in shaping our knowledge of how memory works and how these functions change as we age. Dr. Craik’s enormous body of work and leadership in the field has earned him the highest honours, including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Fellow of the Royal Society of London. One of the founding pioneers of Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute, Dr. Craik continues to work alongside Baycrest’s young, up-and-coming scientists, collaborating on research into human memory and sharing his vast knowledge and experience with the next generation of leading minds.

Food for Thought

For more than a decade, Dr. Carol Greenwood has explored the relationship between diet, nutrition and brain health. She and her colleagues are working to understand what factors in our diet can increase our risk of cognitive loss as we age, and what we can do proactively through our diet to help retain our brain function. Dr. Greenwood was the first researcher to show that the average North American diet, if consumed in middle age, can contribute to cognitive decline. Now, Dr. Greenwood and her colleagues are using brain imaging technology to map and understand the biological factors that connect diet to dementia, and ultimately to identify food strategies that can help to set our brains up for healthy aging.

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Signals to Noise

You're at a cocktail party. There are people conversing all around you. How do you follow one specific conversation and sort it from the rest of the background noise? It seems that as we get older, this ability becomes increasingly difficult. Dr. Claude Alain's research is focused on investigating how our perception of sound changes as we age. Why, for example, do older people have more difficulty listening in multi-conversation environments like the aforementioned cocktail party?

Using a variety of brain imaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Dr. Alain and his colleagues are able to look at how the brain processes auditory information. The researchers can gauge, for example, whether specific frequencies are causing the problem, or if it's related to processes in a certain part of the brain – knowledge that can lead to improvements and refinements to the way we design hearing aids or other clinical tools.

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Super Models

How do we make sense of the vast amounts of neuroscience data we have at our disposal? What are the patterns that we can identify in this data? And how can we use these patterns to predict future outcomes? As a statistician scientist Dr. Malcolm Binns is involved in developing mathematical models for neuroscience data. His research focus spans a number of areas – from developing models that predict how brain functions such as memory and attention change as we age, to applying and improving statistical methods to investigate cognitive deficits and behavioural disturbances in specific patient populations such as those with Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, or traumatic brain injury. In making use of improved statistical methods and mathematical models, Dr. Binns's research work is helping to extend our knowledge of human cognition and behaviour.

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The Whole Picture

 

Why do certain families, and even ethnicities, live longer, healthier lives? What factors make some susceptible to disease and what factors protect against it? Dr. Tomáš Paus is looking for these answers by studying the complex interactions between environment and genes. At the Trans-generational Brain and Body Centre, located at Baycrest, Dr. Paus and his team use advanced imaging tools to study brain behaviour and its relationship to physical health, lifelong experiences and genetic variations.

In his current research, Dr. Paus is studying family members spanning three generations (grandparents, parents, children) to explore how nature and nurture interact to shape the brain and body across the lifespan. The goal is to determine the factors that influence whether a person will age in a healthy manner or be at risk of developing disorders such as depression, dementia, obesity and diabetes. In turn, these findings may help us to develop personalized preventive strategies to stay healthy as long as possible.

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Reliving the experience

When people have a rich and vivid memory of a past experience, it’s often described as being transported back in time, or a feeling that we are reliving the moment. In a recent study, Dr. Bradley Buchsbaum and his colleagues showed that there are similarities between how the brain processes a direct perception of a vivid experience and the memory of that experience. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers were able to map the similarities in brain activity when people were asked to watch a diverse set of video clips, and when asked to remember those clips. The results show that complex, vivid memory involves, to some degree, reinstating the same pattern of brain activity as in the original perception. It could be said that we are, in effect, reliving the experience. Such research is expanding our understanding of how the brain processes information, knowledge that may one day yield new ideas about how to help people sustain memory function or prevent its impairment.

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Difference in the Details

 

Assessing language function in patients with neurological conditions has traditionally been done by conducting behavioural tests. These tests, however, don’t capture the subtle variability in language use – especially those associated with milder forms of impairment as in patients with dementia or traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Jed Meltzer and his colleagues are exploring the use of new computational linguistics tools to improve diagnosis and treatment of cognitive impairment. His research focuses on how language is processed in the brain, with emphasis on how undamaged neural pathways can be used to recover cognitive and linguistic abilities. Employing brain-mapping tools such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), Dr. Meltzer and his team can view and measure the involvement of specific pathways and how they change over time – knowledge that offers the potential for future behavioural intervention and stroke rehabilitation strategies tailored to individual patients.

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