Once upon a time there was a kingdom in Arizona run by a King (Dr. Bruce McNaughton, ARL-Neural Systems, Memory and Aging) and a Queen (Dr. Carol Barnes, ARL-Neural Systems, Memory and Aging). The kingdom was called NSMA and all the subjects participated in the pursuit of knowledge. The King and Queen kept extremely busy with royal tasks like visiting their other kingdom in California or advising the nobles of the Arizona kingdom, but they always made time for even the little subjects. One day one of the smallest subjects of all proposed to become an ambassador to Norway and work under a great council of kings and queens headed by the king and queen of the northern kingdom in Trondheim, the Mosers.
And the King asked, “Whence do you propose to go about this?” The small subject answered, “I shall seek the Oracle.” She then boarded a mighty cat-drawn-tram for the arduous journey from Life Sciences North to Life Sciences South where she found the great Ms. Bender, oracle and orderer of paperwork. Thus her quest began.
Working with two kings, the seemingly ceaseless trail of forms and article reading, subject studying, method perfecting and number crunching steadily came to an end. The application for BRAVO! was complete.
The next trial before the quest could begin was a daunting interview with the Oracle and her great team of brilliant wizards. The small scholar sequestered her friends and forced them to sit through innumerable readings of her presentation until the day of reckoning.
That night seemed enduring and nebulous for the little scholar. She practiced and practiced until she could practice no longer and fell into a restless slumber. When the day came, she arrived to the mouth of the cave in her best scholarly robes. The Oracle spoke from within, “NEXT…”
The scholar did as she was told and entered the cave. Then a haze came over her as she deftly maneuvered through her presentation without uttering “Ummmmmm…” more than 40 times. She adeptly fielded questions from the wise council who then asked her to wait in the antechamber. She languished the interminable ten minutes while they discussed her proposal. She was bid to re-enter and in their mighty presence, her heart pounding, they declared her proposal ACCEPTED!…And there was much rejoicing.
BACK TO REALITY…..It is true that Norway makes one think of fairy tales. I lived across an old bridge from an old cathedral and a ten minute walk to a state of the art lab, where I had the opportunity to work last summer. It is a beautiful country with a pristine nature and an amazing social system. Nobody is poor or homeless or hungry. Higher education is the majority, not the minority. The people don’t age (maybe due to lack of sunlight during the winter). Everyone speaks English (I think their high school drop outs speak better English than our high school drop outs)! I even got a chance to test out the health care system (don’t blame the rat; he was just a little hungry).
The lab, the Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, was just as great as the country. It was obviously well provided for and had actually just won an amazing award giving them the status of a Research Institute of Excellence. I had access to almost any technology available and every technology that I needed. There were some different rules, but nothing very “shocking.” The people were just about the greatest I had ever met, let alone in one place.
The research went well, although I wasn’t able to complete all that I had set out to do. I had hoped to implant and test four animals while there for three months. After implanting the first animal I realized what an impossible task that would be and aimed for two instead. These two still required long hours in the lab and I am glad that I came to a reasonable compromise.
I was (and still am) in the process of developing a new behavioral technique to test mental mapping inertia and the involvement of the CA3 subfield of the hippocampus in memory retrieval. The environment I used was called a morph box. This box was made of 32 steel panels about 10cm wide, each connected by small hinges. The small hinges allowed almost any shape to be made.
To test the animals, I started by training them in the two core environments, a circle and a square, after having been implanted with a hyperdrive. A hyperdrive is a small piece of equipment that one can place on the animals’ head to listen to the electric signals in their brain. This is done by using electrodes which are lowered into the position chosen and this is dependent on the information one wishes to retrieve. From the hyperdrive, I could listen to the CA1 subfield of the hippocampus. In this region, mental mapping occurs. Mental mapping is the correlation of pyramidal cells with certain locations in the environment called place fields. Once I got stable and unique mental maps, I could morph the box from a circle to a square using five intermediate, graduated environments as I continued to record from the hyperdrive. After performing the experiment, I needed to analyze the recording but what I expected to see was sort of mental mapping inertia. By this I mean that while the graduated environments looked more like the circle, the animals’ mental maps should look almost identical to the circle. However, once the environment looks more like the square than the circle there should be a jump of the animals’ maps to resemble that of a square.
My work from this summer is just the beginning. I am now going to spend the next nine months analyzing all of the information from the experiments with the two animals. I will return to Norway next August to carry on the experiment with more animals and some different variables.
I would like to publicly thank: Dr. Bruce McNaughton for all of his time and energy, I know how precious these are; Drs. Edvard and Mary Britt Moser for welcoming me into their lab this summer and next year, their confidence in me means more than they will know; Reuben Goodman for the emotional support of this small scholar and for being able to recite my presentation by the day of reckoning; and, of course, my oracle, Ms. Bender who saw things for me that I only dreamt about before I met her and then made them happen. Again, thank you all.
Retsina Meyer, UBRPer in Dr. Bruce McNaughton's lab, ARL-Neural Systems, Memory and Aging
