First Day of School

Because the Weizmann Institute had to cancel courses last fall due to protests, they're making up for it by offering summer classes to the graduate students here. Luckily for me, this means I'm able to attend free lectures without having to worry about a grade…and I'll be learning from some of the brightest minds in neuroscience. I'm so excited! If there's one thing I understand, it's school. I'm thrilled to be able to just attend a class and learn (does that make me sound lame or what!?).

Of the many classes being offered this summer, I'm going to try and attend at least four, all of which meet only once a week for two hours each. Yesterday was my first lecture in "Learning and Memory," a course being offered for the first time in three years by Yadin Dudai. The talk yesterday was mostly introductory. Professor Dudai showed us a famous case study film on Clive, a man who suffers from severe amnesia. It was both intriguing and discomforting to watch this patient who couldn't remember events that happened neither prior to his illness nor within last few minutes. He would constantly forget whether he'd just woken up or gone to bed. Nonetheless he was able to remember some facts (like that he had a wife and children) and still retained excellent musical skills. Whenever he saw his wife after a ten minute lapse in time, Clive would hug and kiss her as though they were being reunited for the first time in decades. Although it was amazing to see how granted we take our capacity to learn and remember things, I was even more astonished at the patience of the wife, who remained calm with Clive the entire time, explaining over and over to him that he had amnesia and soothing him every time he became suddenly lost and distressed.

In addition to Professor Dudai's course, I plan on taking and "Introduction to Neuroscience" course taught by various faculty members, as well as a course on statistics and one on harmonic oscillations! Of course, I'll still have to make time to do my research but I feel that what I learn in these courses will be invaluable both to my career in science and my specific research problems in general.

Besides going to lunch at San Martin (the meat restaurant) today with Lior, I also attended a splendid lecture by Andy Schwartz, an American currently doing research at Pittsburgh (though he used to work both at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University). It was really comforting to hear a lecture given by someone with a solid American accent—I felt right at home for an hour or two. Dr. Schwartz's research centers around how the brain controls body movement. In his most recent work, he implemented his understanding of how populations of neurons in the motor cortex fire during an arm movement to train a monkey to control a prosthetic arm that was electrically connected to his brain! It was quite incredible to see movies of how the monkey used the arm to reach for fruit and marshmallows and feed himself. He did it completely naturally, as if it was an extension of his own body! I think it was most amazing when he moved the artificial hand his mouth and licked off the sticky marshmallow residue when the experiment was done.