Question: Would you like to learn more about a certain section of science

Paul Matusz answered on 13 Nov 2018:

Hi ,

That’s a fantastic question, thanks! The short answer is – YES! As you can read in my profile I am interested especially in helping children (and also adults) who don’t have certain functions, like they don’t see sharp in one eye (“lazy eye”) which in fact makes them pay attention not as well as children of thei same age, which in turn makes them learn slower, for example, how to read, how to do basic maths, and they definitely will not ever dare to go into professions that involve processing of space – as , because their eyes don’t work together (the brain ignores the input from the “bad” eye), they don’t see objects as having 3 dimensions! That’s a huge loss of life and potential. So I combine right now what we know about 1) paying attention – from psychology, 2) how brain learns skills, like reading or recognising faces – from brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience, 3) what are the current treatments for lazy eye – from ophthalmology, 4) what tools that we have currently, like games, like virtual reality, etc. can be used to make learning easier and more fun – technology. So. There are also veyr cool studies being done on certain drugs – molecules – that make learning easier – like, they let adults learn to have “absolute pitch” (people can recreate any musical note just from memory – super hard!) – a skill that is traditionally thought to be trainable only in childhood, so when the brain is VERY changeable by experience. How cool is that?! There is other cool work done in using substances affecting cells to turn into other cells, like for exmaple, missing photosensitive cells in the retina that could help blind/ visually impaired people regrow these cells – and hopefully see again! So one cool way in which I’d like to develop my research is to include molecular neuroscience in my quest to improve treatments for people who can’t “see” (you can think that dyslexia is a form of “word blindness” – maybe we can cure it too!).