My name is Agatha Lenartowicz, we are at UCLA
at the Semel Institute and I’m a professional cognitive neuroscientist. So, my task, my
job is to try to understand how the brain systems work that produce cognition. So things
like attention, memory and similar. And for me, in particular, I am interested in understanding
the neural systems that allow us to attend and control distractions. So I am Polish-Canadian,
I’m actually an immigrant and I moved to Canada when I was about 8 or 9 and I was raised
just outside of Toronto. I have always been fascinated with people. Just how we behave,
how we interact, how we make our choices. What I’ve been fascinated with is the appearance
of having control over these actions. It becomes clear if we look at the human being closely,
that we don’t have that much control that there’s these sort of systems inside that
dictates the choices that we make and how we behave so I was very interested from the
very beginning in understanding how people work. So, when you’re sitting in a bus and
you’re reading and you hear people on the bus speaking, in an ideal situation you’re
reading and you can ignore the voices, but sometimes you can’t. And so when you think
about why can’t you ignore distractions, well maybe, you’re tired, so that’s fatigue.
Maybe you’re really excited by dinner this evening, so that’s a distraction but it’s
an internal distraction because it’s a thought that’s distracting you. So there’s many
reasons why distractions can happen, so understanding how those different distractions come about
through brain mechanisms, I think it’ll be really fundamental to better understanding
causes of distractibility or conditions like ADHD. So to measure brain activity, we use
one of two techniques, one of which is Magnetic Resonance Imaging, where individuals are laying
down and we take a picture of their brain and then we look at those images closer and
use computer algorithms to understand how information flows from region to region. We
also use a technique called Electroencephalography, or EEG, where we use a cap which sits on the
scalp and it contains sensors that measure electric activity coming from the brain. And
this technique allows us to track very, very quickly millisecond by millisecond, how the
brain is activating, so it gives us time information about brain activity. I always think about
the parents that I see who come in with kids with ADHD or adults who come with ADHD and
I would like to give them a concrete answer. So what is wrong? or what can I do? So if
you’re the type of person who is curious about the world and likes to solve puzzles
and come up with new solutions to complicated problems, science is probably a fantastic
path for you.