By Emily Ayshford / UChicago News
Our memories form our sense of self, and when they are disrupted—through conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and post-traumatic stress disorder—our quality of life can be greatly affected.
University of Chicago neurobiologist Mark Sheffield wants to understand how memories are created, stored and retrieved at the biological level. Using imaging techniques and a virtual reality environment, his research lab measures the activity of neurons and their connections within the brain. The goal is to understand these complex memory processes to better treat conditions that affect memory.
To learn more, we spoke to Sheffield, an associate professor of neurobiology, as well as graduate students Ariana Tortolani and Julliana Ramirez-Matias.
Where are we in understanding just how the brain works?
Sheffield: We’re just scratching the surface. We have good ideas about how we think memory works, but testing the ideas—that’s the difficulty, given how many neurons there are and how many connections there are.
Tortolani: We are at the point of asking simple questions, like what your brain does as you walk to a coffee shop. It seems like such a simple task, but there are so many complexities in the brain with how neurons fire and interact, and how that guides and impacts behaviors. It’s just really interesting.