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All right. I'm going to take your mask off. I can't see. I'm going to take it off. Don't you worry.

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How are you? I'm calling you from the bowels of the lab here.

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The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe and we are in the middle

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of a scientific revolution to understand its inner workings. Join us for a conversation with

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world-renowned neuroscientists as they visit Rochester. I am Dr. John Foxe, director of the

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Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester and you are listening

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to neuroscience perspectives. Tanya, thanks so much for joining us today in these strange times

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where we can't be together. I've wanted to interview you for so long. Obviously you and

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I know each other for many, many years now. In some ways you're an amazing American story.

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You started out your life in Riga in Latvia and which stops in Poland and Denmark before your

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career in the US. Would you tell us a little bit about that? How did you end up in America?

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What drove you to these various places to get your training? I came to the States on a NATO

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fellowship from Denmark for a year to the University of Maryland and it was also an accident.

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In the old days we used to request reprints. I requested a reprint from

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Bill Hodders who was a professor at the University of Maryland who worked on pigeons. This is at the

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time I was studying memory and a little bit of vision but mostly memory in the pigeon as a

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model system. I wrote to him just asking for reprints and he saw my name and then he looked at

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Denmark because he's been to Copenhagen apparently some years before and then he said what are you

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doing there? Why don't you come and work with me? So I said oh that sounds good. So I applied for a

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fellowship, NATO fellowship, because that was one thing I could do. I was a graduate, well I was

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kind of a graduate, postgraduate student in Copenhagen at the time. It was at the Copenhagen

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University and I got it and I went. Antónia can we turn the clock even further back to your

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childhood in Latvia and what took you from Latvia to Poland? I grew up, I was born in Latvia. I grew

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up in, it was a Soviet Union at the time, so I was Russian speaking. They were both Latvian and

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Russian speakers. Of course Latvia was dominated by the Russians and the Soviet Union at the time.

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In the Soviet Union during Stalin times people who actually wanted to leave couldn't leave.

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Almost like now, you know, we can't go anywhere, right? Yeah, yeah. What kind of saying? Anyway,

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and my parents really wanted to leave the country and when Kruschev came to power he allowed a lot

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of people who were stuck in the Soviet Union and my mother was from Poland. She could prove it.

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They let us, it's called repatriation, they let us go to Poland. It was on the way to

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Israel. That was the plan because Poland was a lot freer than the Soviet Union so we came to Poland.

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You really wanted the details? Yeah, of course. I mean it's an amazing story and I mean so the

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plan was to keep going to Israel but you stopped in Poland and stayed then. Well we were there

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waiting for my brother who didn't leave with us and then he was a lot older than me. He was,

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he just got married, he didn't want to leave. Another long story, he married the Russian girl

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whose father was a real Soviet patriot who did not let her leave. Right. And you have to have a

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permission even as an adult of your parents permission to go anywhere. So they stayed behind

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and it took 10 years and eventually my brother joined us but it took 10 years of my mother crying

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her eyes out and trying to get a visa for him. Eventually he made it but only after they told

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him that he has to get a divorce. These stories are of high interest because in at this time in

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history too and maybe we won't get too deep into politics with the sort of rise of autocracy again

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people have forgotten what it was like. That's right. In fact the way people were able to live

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in this country for so many years they've completely divorced from politics. Well my life

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was never divorced from politics. It was always completely part of it. My parents could not talk

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to me about anything political because I would go to school and I would tell people and then they

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would get arrested. So I never knew anything what was going on and then eventually we did

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come to Poland and it was communist of course but it was freer. Yeah. And I finished high school

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in Poland and then I went to the university Warsaw University to study psychology and

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it was my country. I always had no interest in going anywhere. How did Copenhagen come about?

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Again politics right. So the Jews in Poland who were completely assimilated including me

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suddenly became the fifth column. There was open anti-semitic campaign everywhere because there was

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a lot of unrest and demonstrations because of what happened in Czechoslovakia. There was Prague

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Spring and Dupchik came to power and the Poles well we at the time wanted to have democracy too.

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That's just like in Czechoslovakia. It wasn't called Czech Republic at the time. But there

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were demonstrations and everything was blamed on the Jews. This is typical. There was an announcement

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a short announcement in the paper on the front page of the Rzice Warszaw, which is the Polish main

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Polish newspaper that said all the Poles of Jewish origin who planned to leave the country

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should apply before September 1st. After that the procedure will change. That's it.

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So what do you think happened to the 15,000? Whatever remaining Jews there were and they were

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all quite we were all quite assimilated and wasn't really even though it was written down

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in your passport it said whether you're Jewish or whatever. We didn't want to go to Israel.

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We knew we needed to leave and there were two countries in Europe that were accepting

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Jewish refugees. It was Denmark and Sweden. Amazing. Yeah, my parents went to Sweden and

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I went to them. And the reason for Sweden is because my brother was with them already by that

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time. He just came and he didn't want to go to it talking about politics and how it controlled

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him. He didn't want to go to a NATO country. Denmark was a NATO. Sweden was not right. That's

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why they went to Sweden and I didn't want to go to Sweden. I wanted to be in Copenhagen because I

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already had a colleague who I knew from Warsaw from the same institute who was already there.

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He was even a well-known Basel Ganglia researcher who's gone now but he was there. So I said okay,

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I know one person now so I went there. Fantastic. I mean really an amazing story.

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And then I was at this institute of experimental biology. I was giving a clinical psychology degree

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actually which I got master's in clinical and I also started doing research on the brain

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and memory actually. So I was working in Konorski's lab and Konorski was in this was

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my claim to fame. Konorski was a student of Pavlov's. That's pretty good. Yes very much.

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I was doing a thesis at the time using a dog as an animal model just studying

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short-term memory. I believe it was auditory short-term memory. So this is what my thesis was

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but I wasn't trying to go anywhere and had to finish my thesis before September. Otherwise

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they would throw me out of the university. I had to apply before September. So I did. Got a letter

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from Konorski which I still have which is cool and applied to go to Denmark.

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And I couldn't take my thesis with me or any documents. It had to go through the

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Dutch embassy. It was weird. Complicated. You couldn't just take things with you.

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And you had to get permission from all of the various government institutions to actually

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leave. So everything I have all of the documents assigned by this the bureaucracies and I got on

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the train. You know I think it's instructive to youngsters today what people had to do to be

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successful in that time and somehow you by a hook-and-by-cook you ended up in western New York

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at the University of Rochester which is where you spent the bulk of your career and I'm sitting

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right now in the University of Rochester where my own lab is. And one comment I had was that

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clinical psychology degree I can attest to the fact that it served you well over the intervening

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years because what people who won't know necessarily but except those of us who've been here at Rochester

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with you is that you're somebody we everybody went to with problems when they needed them solved

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over the years and that you always were you know a really deeply compassionate person.

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Which brings us to my next question because well I'm going to come back to your science but I'm

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very interested in the fact that you have spent a long illustrious and very successful career

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as a basic researcher but now you're down at the National Institute of Health taking the call to

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public service. Here's a question is there something that you've learned since you went down

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to NIH that that surprised you? I'm learning a tremendous amount about

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the review process that we fight so much for right what it actually takes to give us

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money. We're usually they're very often upset and unhappy and right about oh it's unfair.

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It's extremely difficult to get right. So many exceptional people competing for

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so few dollars it's bound to be difficult. Also the review process itself it's quite interesting

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because people who run those SROs like me right now the scientific review officers

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it's not their field most of the time. They don't know the field so they there's a lot of

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information online. I can go and look you up and I can find out what your expertise is who is like

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you so they would you could actually say somebody like John Fox you literally click and there's

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some keywords that go with you the expertise, research interests, blah blah blah all of that

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and then if if I cannot get you even though you would be the perfect reviewer for me

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I can go through and find somebody who has similar expertise but this is how a lot of

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SROs work. At the moment I'm very new I'm really lucky because I can pull names out of my head

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which I do because I know the community it just happens and I was very lucky that they really

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want me to work on Brain Initiative. Can you tell our audience a little bit just quick background

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about the Brain Initiative they'll have certainly heard of it on the news but just quickly what it

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means? Well it's really started in 2014 I think and and the funding came in and it's really quite

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good and it's BRAIN stands for Brain Research Advances in Neurotechnology something like that

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that's what makes it so it's all about developing the most advanced approaches to the global study

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of the brain at different levels so there's a lot of push of developing new technology but that means

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recording rather than from one neuron at a time recording from thousands of neurons at the time

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data analysis all of that so there is a really good amount of money now to try to

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change the way we approach systems neuroscience of course but at the same time there is a big push on

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the new the networks of course we're studying it's all networks right? Right yeah and you have your

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own efforts are have a concentration on on invasive brain mapping in humans right? What happens is

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that some proposals came in and I was this is something I could do I mean I don't know I

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haven't done any invasive brain work right of course in humans but I've been in monkeys forever

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right? Yes yeah right so it was kind of natural for them and I know the field that so I got out

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there were only I ended up with eight proposals to do they're big but there are just eight

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right and so the focus of this particular program which is this invasive program is even

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though it says clinical trial and only have you seen the RFA on this it says clinical trial but

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anytime you have humans it's called clinical trial. Yes yeah. Focus is really on not on clinical

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trial trying to come up with some ways of improving human condition yet you're trying to understand

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the mechanisms it's very much close to what you are really interested in. You know one of the things

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that can be difficult to explain to folks is why it's so important to do basic science I mean your

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career was defined by doing fundamental basic science agnostic as to for example a disease

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model or something you know something that you were trying to cure but and people would might say

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well why are we spending money to do this when we should really be spending the money to do

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disease? We are spending money to to deal with disease there is no way you could understand

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the disease even if you don't understand the organization of the brain we know that that

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uh let's say Parkinson's has major problems with frontal lobe among other things right and major

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problems with the basal ganglia right so we are not going to understand and figure out what to do

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with with that particular disease if you don't understand the connectivity and interactions

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between those regions so having an opportunity to do it in humans is tricky right? Yeah absolutely

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yeah absolutely at the same time it's very unique so there's some things you could not really do in

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animals very easily well you can't do it at all if you study language that's what you do right among

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other things can't you can't do this but you could you look at mechanisms of of language processing

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in humans now how do you do that you can't make holes in humans heads just right but this is

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opportunistic so you have patients with epilepsy mostly who are going to have surgery they are

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already instrumented so there are already electrodes in their brain so the idea in this program is not

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to add more electrodes because you really can't do this right to use what you have and try to come

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up with clever behavioral tasks right where you could actually record already where you're in the

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locations where these electrodes exist right you have to come up with really clever behavioral tasks

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right to whatever question you're going to be addressing and of course appropriate recording

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techniques and data analysis which is the key so the experimental design is as important in

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human in these experiments if not more as it is this would be working with non-human primates or

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mice yeah you're making two really really crucial points i love that you know the opportunistic

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nature of it right we don't we don't do surgeries in humans so we can record their brains it's

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because they've already had the surgeries and the other part is that you can't fix something that's

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broken if you don't understand how it works in the first place and that's that's the the key to this

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i wanted to get back to your own science i want to ask you really straightforward question you

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you you spent a career studying the nature by which the brain represents information over time

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this working so-called working memory could you give us a couple of big insights there things that

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i have to move you back in my career because it is i mean my main focus has always been ever since

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poland it was really relating brain and behavior it's really whether it happens to be working

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memory tasks which are much more recent in my life except for the early stuff and pigeons but

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generally right i'm really a vision scientist who was trying who has always been trying to understand

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how sensory information or visual information is processed in the brain in cortex in particular

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there is not a single task that you ever perform or your subject or yourself or anybody else it

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it doesn't include if you do have any kind of sensory signal you will always have a mechanism

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you will need a mechanism to retain it even very briefly particularly in working memory because

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there's no no behavioral task it doesn't involve working memory does it just focus on it sounds

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cooler working memory school right motion perception yeah it's good but it's basically

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inseparable i believe so you just asked me about the working memory right it has a cool factor

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that people like to pay attention to but i think it's separable from the rest of the work that

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i've done actually in a cat for many many years really relating what specific regions in cat cortex

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what is their it's role in being able to make a decision about visual stimuli it's a decision

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making as well what a profound privilege it has been to work with you you and i only overlapped

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here for for about five years you're so well known in our field you're a leading light in our field

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and i can't think of a better person to be at program at the national institute of health

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helping guide the future of vision science cognitive science you're you're a beacon to

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to folks in the field i feel very privileged that i i mean it was sad for me to leave but i feel

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privileged that i can actually make have an impact now maybe a little bit broader i do think that

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that you know we started out with the what you had to do to get to where you are and the trajectory

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in your life and in the in the struggles and the trials and tribulations comes fortitude and the

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ability to stay focused and to stay at things and that's one of the hallmarks of the way in which

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you've approached science over the years and i know i speak for the field that that we're thankful for

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that