{"id":43139,"date":"2011-08-08T08:14:13","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T12:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=43139"},"modified":"2011-08-16T08:33:36","modified_gmt":"2011-08-16T12:33:36","slug":"the-universe-in-your-skull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/08\/the-universe-in-your-skull\/","title":{"rendered":"The Universe in Your Skull"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Pradeep<\/a>
Pradeep Ramanathan, assistant professor of communication sciences, with a scan of his own brain. (Daniel Buttrey\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the mid-1990s, Pradeep Ramanathan was working at the technology company Intel in California\u2019s Silicon Valley. With a background in physics and engineering, he was successful in his job, but he had an insistent feeling that he was \u201ccaught in a rat race,\u201d as he says.<\/p>\n

On a whim, he took a career test, which told him he should be a speech pathologist.<\/p>\n

Now, almost 15 years later, he is an assistant professor of communication sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, conducting research on memory and traumatic brain injuries. Despite twists and turns along the way, like taking coursework in Southeast Asian studies and his native language Tamil at Berkeley, singing in operas, and becoming an advanced meditation practitioner, Ramanathan has gone from engineer to speech pathologist to college professor\u2014and never looked back.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just kind of fell into this,\u201d he says. \u201cI love the brain, and that\u2019s what brought me here.\u201d<\/p>\n

After leaving his job at Intel, Ramanathan enrolled in the speech pathology graduate program at the University of Minnesota and then began working in a stroke center at a local hospital. Seeing so many patients with brain injuries convinced him he wanted to help these people in a substantive way.<\/p>\n

Today, Ramanathan studies traumatic brain injuries, which occur when some physical impact affects the brain\u2019s normal function. No matter how or where a person is hit in the head\u2014whether a soldier who is harmed in battle or a person who slips on ice\u2014certain parts of the brain are more frequently injured than others, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you get hit in the head, the frontal lobes are very often affected, and that\u2019s where much of the self-regulation of behavior and sociobehavioral interactions takes place,\u201d Ramanathan says.<\/p>\n

Among the problems that can arise from these injuries are changes in what is called metamemory, which involves the awareness and control of one\u2019s own memory processes.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople with traumatic brain injuries are often not as aware of how bad their memory has become,\u201d says Ramanathan. \u201cThe ability to encode and retrieve information is often impaired in these patients. And on top of that, they may have reduced awareness of this memory impairment, which in turn means they may be less inclined to do something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Issues with metamemory can become serious problems: for example, a person may be so sure of their memory that they don\u2019t think they need a reminder to take their medications, and then they forget to do so.<\/p>\n

Ramanathan\u2019s work examines aspects of this phenomenon using experiments in his laboratory. Subjects with and without brain injuries are asked to remember a series of pairs of words, and then asked how confident they are that they will remember them for a test. These metamemory judgments provide a window into individuals\u2019 awareness of their memory performance.<\/p>\n

To determine whether or not metamemory is related to skills like planning, reasoning, and problem solving, Ramanathan compares subjects\u2019 ratings of their confidence in their memory to standardized tests of these functions. He has recently found that certain types of planning skills seem to be correlated with the ability to make metamemory judgments. But interestingly, individuals with traumatic brain injury seem to have difficulty applying these planning skills when they attempt to make such metamemory judgments.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to figure out how people with traumatic brain injuries could get better and more realistic in their assessments of their own memory,\u201d Ramanathan says.<\/p>\n

He is also interested in what makes us remember things more or less easily. For example, scientists know that seeing, say, an upright piano will make you more quickly identify the piano subsequently. But Ramanathan and his colleagues found in 2010 that if you had instead first seen a desk of similar appearance, it would make you slightly slower or less accurate in identifying the piano.<\/p>\n

The more similar two objects are\u2014without being identical\u2014the more they interfere with each other in our brains. The phenomenon is called antipriming\u2014the opposite of its predecessor, priming, and Ramanathan wants to know how it works in people with traumatic brain injuries. Currently, he is creating neural network computer models to simulate what happens in the brain during each of these experiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cPriming functions are surprisingly intact in many traumatic brain injury survivors,\u201d he says. \u201cBut is their antipriming intact?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometime down the road, Ramanathan would like to bring his personal passion for meditation into his work. The type of meditation he practices, called Vipassana meditation, trains the mind to focus in ways that are often disrupted in people who have brain injuries and impaired judgment. He speculates that this type of meditation could also have a positive effect on people in prisons who display impaired judgment and escalated aggression, since many of them have suffered brain injuries.<\/p>\n

But all that\u2019s in the future. For now, Ramanathan is happy to be out of his Silicon Valley cubicle and into a career that he says marshals all of his skills: engineering, physics, speech pathology, and even meditation.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything has to do with how the brain processes information,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like an entire universe in your skull.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pradeep Ramanathan studies how brain injuries affect memory\u2014and how good we think our memory is. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":43613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-43139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-12 14:28:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43139"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44230,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43139\/revisions\/44230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/43613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43139"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=43139"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=43139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}