How do we take in new information? How do we remember it? Though he suffered setbacks along the way, University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist Loren Frank’s study of the hippocampus — a brain region vital for learning and memory — has led to new understanding about memory. His recent studies point to the importance of downtime for the brain and could one day be used to help improve teaching methods for children and adults.
How do you study learning and memory?
The experiences we have often shape who we are, our feelings about things, and the decisions we make in life. In our lab, we are trying to figure out what happens in the brain when we store and retrieve a memory. To do this, we record the electrical signals nerve cells in the hippocampus use to communicate with each other in rats as they explore different settings. This allows us to get a sense of what the hippocampus is doing as an animal is experiencing a new environment or remembering a previous one.
What’s so important about the hippocampus?
The hippocampus is really good at learning things that only happen once, whereas the rest of the brain usually takes multiple repetitions to learn something. Scientists believe the hippocampus learns things as they happen, and then when it gets a chance, it repeats those things by sending messages back out to the rest of the brain — almost acting like a teacher. We used to think the hippocampus only did its teaching when we sleep. However, our studies found the hippocampus playback process also happens while animals are awake.
Why is this significant?
Our findings suggest the brain really takes advantage of the times we not only shove things into it and when we’re paying attention to the outside world, but it also takes advantage of the times we give it a little downtime. This could potentially be a big deal, particularly in our modern world where we’re shoving stuff into our heads without allowing ourselves much time for things to rumble around in there. Since my studies are performed in rats, I can’t predict how the findings translate to humans, but it would surprise me if a lack of downtime wasn’t affecting learning in people in some way.
How could you see your research influencing teaching practices?
We have to be careful because rats are not the same as people and we don’t want to overgeneralize, but previous studies in people show it’s best to take breaks during studying. I think that what we’re discovering is maybe why that is. The period when the hippocampus and the rest of the brain are interacting and sorting through past memories and engraining the ones that really matter is probably really crucial for effective memory function. This suggests that if we’re not giving ourselves enough downtime, it’s probably negatively impacting our ability to remember stuff and make decisions on the basis of our memories.
Offering students educational programs that are a little more varied, where you’re able to move around and take a break before coming back to what you were doing might actually be more effective. It may be that if we really understand the parameters of these things in the brain we may be able to actually create schedules that are more optimal for children and adults to learn.
What excites you most about the work you’re doing?
I feel like we’re really making progress toward understanding a truly fundamental aspect of ourselves and how we interact with and process our world. This is both personally gratifying but also generally gratifying because it has a possibly broad impact.
What has been the greatest challenge in your scientific career thus far?
I spent three solid years failing utterly. It was incredibly demoralizing and depressing, but I just hated the thought of being beaten. I had to rework my approach to things and learn how to do a bunch of stuff that at the time I didn’t know how to do.
I think that one of the things people often don’t realize about science is that because you are trying to solve problems no one has ever solved before, there’s a lot of failure. You have to be willing to say, 'I’m going to fail and I’m going to fail multiple times, but if I keep going, eventually I’ll get somewhere.