'The first time I stuck one of these electrodes onto one of these cells and could see the electrical activity happening in real time on the oscilloscope, I thought, 'Oh my God, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!'' Harnett says. Harnett, who recently earned tenure in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, now studies the electrical properties of neurons and how these properties enable neural circuits to perform the computations that give rise to brain functions such as learning, memory, and sensory perception. 'My lab's ultimate goal is to understand how the cortex works,' Harnett says. 'What are the computations' How do the cells and the circuits and the synapses support those computations' What are the molecular and structural substrates of learning and memory' How do those things interact with circuit dynamics to produce flexible, context-dependent computation'' Harnett's interest in science was sparked in...
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