Field of research in Lifebrain
I’m interested in normal and pathological changes in brain and cognition in old age, particularly memory.
What was your motivation for getting engaged in brain research?
As a child, I’d always been interested in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. I went to university to study physics, but took an extra course that eventually seduced me into graduating in experimental psychology. I then combined this with my childhood interests to study artificial intelligence during my postgraduate years. After a while however, I realised that many interesting questions about cognition cannot be answered by human psychology and computer models alone, because of the many ways that a machine/brain can solve the same problem (eg memory). This is why I got involved in brain research too, using neuroimaging and neuropsychology to constrain models of human memory (i.e, how evolution had solved the problem in human brains). Mostly recently, I’ve become interested in memory problems in old age and dementia, particularly since my father suffered from the latter.
What do you find most interesting in the Lifebrain project?
The large amount of MRI data, providing greater statistical power than within our own local cohorts to examine age-related changes in regions associated with memory. I’m also excited by the large amount of lifestyle data, particularly what we can do (for example in middle age) that will help prevent cognitive problems later in life (see below).
What is the most burning scientific question in your opinion in our times (in your field of brain research?)
How many different memory systems do we have, and how are they instantiated in our brains? Why is our (episodic) memory one of the first abilities we notice failing as we grow older? What distinguishes normal age-related memory loss from abnormal loss in dementias like Alzheimer’s Disease?
What can people do for their brain health?
We have preliminary data in our Cambridge cohort (CamCAN) that middle-age activities predict cognitive ability in old age. Our older retired individuals took a test of fluid intelligence and also answered a questionnaire about what activities they had done in their youth and middle age. We found that fluid intelligence was predicted by amount of middle-age physical, mental and social activities, even after allowing for
1) education during youth,
2) occupation during middle age and
3) current physical, mental and social activities in old age.
Encouraging middle-age people to engage in more physical, mental and social activities, if proved important, would be a relatively simple intervention to help alleviate future individual and societal costs of the ageing population.
