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Until Patricia Goldman-Rakic started delving into it, the most important part of the brain, the frontal lobe, was a veritable blank sheet. A gray, wrinkled chunk of tissue tucked behind the forehead and taking up about a third of the total brain mass, it is to the rest of the central nervous system what a CEO is to a modern corporation. It takes sensory data fed to it by the rest of the organization (smells, sounds, tastes, etc.) and decides what it all means and what should be done about it. It's largely responsible for our thinking, planning...
Goldman-Rakic, a professor of neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry at Yale, has spent the past 30 years immersed in the frontal lobe. In the early 1970s, working at the National Institute of Mental Health as one of the few women in the field, she became the first scientist to draw a comprehensive biological map of neuroscience's terra incognita, showing that its tangled web of neurons is actually a series of columns of highly specialized nerve cells...
...more basic level to remember the thread of an argument while we are trying to make a point. A brain without working memory is like a computer without its RAM; its computational abilities are crippled, as they often are in people with diseases that affect the frontal lobe, such as cerebral palsy, dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and schizophrenia...
Peanut and raisin rewards have become the coins of Goldman-Rakic's realm. In a series of elegant experiments that combine memory tests with electrical recordings from brain tissue, she has learned, for example, that each part of the brain has its own short-term "scratch pad" in the frontal lobe. Within each of these areas, individual neurons are responsible for holding and processing highly specific pieces of information, like the memory of a particular face or voice...
Despite Goldman-Rakic's best efforts, there is still probably as much we don't know about the frontal lobe as we do. But she has helped open the door wider for other scientists to explore, and given hope and new ideas to researchers studying various conditions--from drug abuse to Parkinson's--that affect memory. Psychologists in particular respect Goldman-Rakic for the way she is constantly trying to bring psychology and biology closer together--thinking about the mind as a whole even while she is looking through a microscope...