A team of researchers at the University of Alberta is working to determine the role of a little-understood region of the brain in controlling how mammals learn and make memories, with the goal of one day finding new treatments for neurological disorders such as dementia.
Jesse Jackson, an assistant professor of physiology and Canada Research Chair in Neural Circuits has been awarded a $940,950 grant over the next five years by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to carry out the research in his lab.
The claustrum is a region deep in the brain that is connected to and communicates with dozens of other parts of the brain. Jackson and his lab recently developed new techniques to study this region's activity in mice. The claustrum has been hard to image with traditional brain-scanning tools such as functional MRI because of its sheet-like structure and its location deep within the cerebral cortex. Researchers know that the claustrum does not function properly in people with memory-related disorders such as dementia.
