Few subjects draw fascination as widely across the FARII community as the brain, the one organ that turns its attention back upon itself. Our researchers work at opposite ends of a broad spectrum, from anatomy and neurobiology through to the more psychological aspects of the field, cognitive behavioural therapy and behavioural neuroscience among them. The tradition here runs deep. Santiago Ramón y Cajal established that the nervous system is built from discrete cells rather than one continuous web, and the drawings he made at his microscope more than a century ago are still reproduced in textbooks today, a reminder that patient looking remains among the sharpest instruments we have.
Much of the work at the institute concentrates on neuropathology, particularly in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. Students investigate the biomarkers that signal these conditions, some of which appear years before the first unmistakable symptoms, and ask what a better reading of those early signs might make possible. The two diseases share a common thread in the misfolding of proteins, whether the alpha-synuclein that gathers in Parkinson's or the amyloid and tau that accumulate in Alzheimer's, which places the question of how a protein finds its shape at the very heart of the search for cures. Tools such as AlphaFold, which predicts three-dimensional structure from an amino acid sequence alone, have opened this territory in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago, and our students work with them directly.
Others among our students take up the brain's capacity to remake itself, working on questions of cortical plasticity of the kind V.S. Ramachandran opened up in his study of phantom limbs. What we draw from his example is as much a matter of method as of findings. He listened to patients describing sensations that others had waved away, and had the patience to keep listening until the pattern beneath them became clear, and then answered with a mirror set in a cardboard box rather than any elaborate apparatus. Deep understanding, it turns out, begins far more often with attention than with equipment.
At the other end of the spectrum, researchers study behaviour itself and where it meets economics. The premise is that the choices people actually make depart in patterned and surprisingly predictable ways from the choices a perfectly rational agent would make, a line of inquiry that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky opened and that has since reshaped economics, medicine, and public policy alike. What binds this end of the work to the other is a single question, which is simply what makes us tick.