"My name is Gideon Rothschild.
I am a post-doc in Lauren Frank's lab here at UCSF at Mission Bay Campus.
So, in the lab generally we studying learning and memory.
And everybody knows what learning and memory is.
We constantly form memories from our everyday experiences.
And what we try to do specifically in this lab is to try and really nail down neural
mechanisms that underlay memory formation, consolidation, and retrieval.
We are constantly surrounded with stimuli: sounds, visions, odors, tastes.
But only a very small fracture of these stimuli are encoded for long-term storage.
If I ask you about yesterday, what happened yesterday, you will only be able to report
a small fraction of that.
And, the question is what determines this information storage, and how this information
is stored for the long term?
What determines which information is stored, and then hunting for the neural mechanisms
underlying this process?
So I'm born and raised in Israel.
I always did have a strong curiosity about people and about behavior.
But I think it was only after I took a couple of neuroscience courses that I realized that
all these behaviors, which me and I guess everybody is very curious about, decision
making, aggression, compassion, all of these things are not just given phenomenon they
actually have identified neural mechanisms.
Maybe because we don't fully understand them, I suddenly realized that there's a huge challenge
here to try and nail down the neural mechanisms underlying for all these animal and human
behaviors.
So, you can kind of divide the research life, at least mine, into a few stages.
The first, I guess six months or a year or maybe less if you are really good, is to try
to realize what you want to do and what is feasible and what has not been studied already.
The second stage which is basically running experiments.
And then the whole of the motivation and all of your resources going into doing the perfect
experiment.
So there a lot of technical details there.
You try to fine tune and optimize numerous parameters that determine the quality of the
data you are going to get eventually.
Once you've done that you go into, at least we go into, the analysis stage.
So then you have the data, but now you have to basically try to understand what is in
there.
You have terabytes and terabytes of data.
And you are trying to see what is the most interesting phenomenon in there.
Its a huge and very interesting stage which I really love.
And then once you have the story which you think best describes your results the idea
is to publish.
That by itself is a challenge.
People with post-traumatic stress disorder are basically haunted by memories from the
past.
And in a way that has a very bad effect on their everyday life.
If we understand how memory works, what trace and where in the brain keeps coming up and
interrupting with their everyday life, then that would open the possible to intervene
and alleviate.
And there are ... I think we're at the stage where these things are starting to come true.
But not only illnesses, but you can also come up with ideas of trying to improve memory
formations.
So for example, if you have a big exam next week and you know this is the time to be concentrated
and to really focus all your attention and what we call, encoding capacities, then you
know maybe we can come up with techniques or maybe even in the future, medications for
facilitating that process.
Memory is so central in our everyday lives that even small steps that help us better
understand how memory works will have huge impact of lives of people either ill or healthy.
And this it can be frustrating.
It can take time.
But I think it is extremely rewarding in the end when you actually have a strong belief
that you uncovered something that was not known before.
That's a very rewarding feeling. "