Education and Path To Discovery
Gould received her Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience in 1988 at UCLA. In 1989, she was a young post-doc working in the lab of Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University, investigating the effect of stress hormones on rat brains. Chronic stress is devastating to neurons, and Gould’s research focused on the death of cells in the hippocampus. (Pasko Rakic's declaration that there was no such thing as neurogenesis was entrenched dogma at that time.) The research was exciting because stress research was a booming field at that time also. However, it was extremely hard work necessitating killing her rats at various time points, pluck their tiny brains out of their cranial encasing, cut through their cortex, slice the hippocampus thinner than a sheet of paper, and with great care count the dying neurons under a microscope. While Gould was documenting the degeneration of these brains, she happened upon something seemingly inexplicable. Evidence pointed to the idea that the brain might also heal itself. She explains, “At first, I assumed I must be counting incorrectly,” Gould said. “There were just too many cells.”
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Gould (psychologist)
Famous quotes containing the words education, path and/or discovery:
“I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)