Word: goldman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...global economy hasn't crashed just yet. But a worldwide slowdown is giving analysts everywhere a bad case of the jitters. The key reason: this, says Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, is "the first synchronized downturn since the 1980s," when high interest rates squeezed the world economy like an orange. During the last U.S. recession, 10 years ago, Europe was in its post-cold war euphoria, while the Asian economies were the stuff of miracle. By the time a financial crisis declawed the Asian tigers in 1997-98, the U.S. economy was in the middle...
...mostly the brains of monkeys, not humans, that Goldman-Rakic studies. This presents certain advantages (monkey brains are extremely similar to ours, and more invasive studies are allowed) and certain challenges. How, for example, do you explore the memories of creatures that cannot speak...
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...
...Goldman-Rakic is as driven as a junior researcher just out of grad school. Her next goal? "A theory of [the entire cerebral] cortical functional architecture down to the level of individual neurons and functional circuits would be very nice," she says. Nice, indeed...