At his Princeton laboratory,Samuel Wang is searching for basic information on how the brains of humans and dogs work. Wang,42,an associate professor at the university,also spends time popularising breakthroughs in his specialtyneuroscience. His book,Welcome to Your Brain,was named 2009 Young Adult Science Book of the Year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Next semester,he will offer a first for Princeton: an undergraduate course called Neuroscience and Everyday Life. Here is an edited version of a four-hour conversation. Youre almost evangelical about your work. Why did you become a neuroscientist? I was at Caltech in 1985,and I took a class in introductory cell biology. I asked my biology instructor a question about neurotransmission. He kind of smirked at me and said,Nobody knows the answer to that. That felt great! It was great to ask a basic question and learn the answer wasnt known. So neuroscience seemed like the way to go. And now is more known? Much more. In the 1980s,we knew some things about how individual neurons,synapses and the brain worked. Today,we have the means to see how they work as a system,together. What has changed is advances in molecular biology,genetics and also technology. The other day,I went to a psychology lecture and I could see how I could turn what Id just heard into an experiment. This colleague was working on decision-making and hed theorised that it is guided,in part,by the release of dopamine. So I told him,We can make dopamine go up very suddenly in the neurocircuitrywe can emulate that little release of chemicals in the dish. So that means its now possible to work out these theoretical ideas in the lab. Is your lab developing any of this new technology? Yes. We are developing ways to look into brain tissue while it is thinking. In my lab,we can tickle different parts of a circuit tens of thousands of times a second. Thats close to emulating real brain function. You are studying the structure of dog brains. How did that project begin? My wife and I took our pet pug for spinal surgery. At the vets office,there were all these M.R.I.s sitting around,hundreds of them,and it struck me: "Hey,dogs arent covered by Hipaa! Their records arent confidential!" It was like discovering a goldmine of data. Were looking for relationships between dog brain size and dog breed characteristics. Australian sheep dogs and poodles can do fairly complex tasks. My pug,hes very sweet,but hes not the brightest. Theres actually a lot of scientific literature on breed characteristics,intelligence and temperament. So we check all these M.R.I.s against these studies,and were trying to find structural correlates. This is a huge opportunity to look at the relationship between brain structure and behavior. Were asking,Do we find a larger cortex the part of the brain thats involved in problem solving and intelligence in those breeds that are good in problem solving? Or,Could we find a larger amygdala,which is related to emotional responses,in dogs that are known to be high strung or nasty? Are there implications for humans in this? Thats not clear yet. Dogs are much more variable than we are. Dogs can vary by a factor of 60 in body mass and a factor of 3 in brain size. You say that functional magnetic resonance imaging has changed brain research. Do you find that some researchers are overinterpreting it? For some,its the new phrenology. There was a piece in one of the newspapers where someone was claiming that he could tell the difference between a liberal and conservative from FMRI. It made me want to scream. The study was done on very small numbers of people and told us next to nothing about the mental process underlying how we form political opinions. Going back to your youthful decision to abandon physics and take up neuroscience: any regrets? Never. My parents,who were immigrants,didnt understand it at the time. I cannot remember ever being able to adequately explain to my mother what I do. That has a little to do with why I wrote Welcome to Your Brain. I wanted to show how neuroscience speaks to everyday life.
