Sarah Raskin thinks about the brain

BY ANDREW WALSH

What’s more interesting than the human brain? Neuroscience, the quest to understand how the brain and nervous system function and how thinking works, has become an important and rapidly changing academic discipline. “When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, we thought that once a human being reached maturity, no changes took place in the brain,” says Sarah Raskin, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience. “Now we know that it changes and reorganizes itself--and that’s incredibly exciting.”

     Sitting in her office in the Jacobs Life Science Center, surrounded by stacks of scientific papers and a large collection of complex cutaway models of the “master organ,” Raskin’s hands fly and her eyes blaze as she discusses the rapid evolution of the relatively young scientific discipline. “When you practice something, you usually get better at it. It turns out that there’s a reason for that. By practicing you are actually reorganizing the way your brain works. Once you grasp that, a whole world of interesting possibilities opens up.”

            A cognitive neuroscientist (“someone who’s interested in the relationship between the brain and behavior”), Raskin joined Trinity’s faculty in 1994, where she found a lively and impressive interdisciplinary program already in place. “Undergraduate programs in neuroscience usually consist of a couple of people in biology and psychology. At Trinity I found a group working in neuroscience that included engineers, chemists, biologists, psychologists, and a philosopher. I can’t tell you how unusual that is.”

            Trinity’s interdisciplinary neuroscience program developed in the 1980s. “Priscilla Kehoe [a member of Trinity’s psychology faculty] was the real pioneer here. More and more of her students were putting together self-designed majors in psychobiology. Eventually she decided there was enough interest to warrant a regular major.” Since the late 1980s, the program has grown remarkably and is frequently described as a national model. “Our students are exposed to many different aspects of neuroscience as they rotate through a series of eight labs run by faculty members who approach it from various home disciplines. They get an extraordinary introduction to neuroscience here, and they get excited.”

            Raskin’s own research derives from the relatively recent realization that brains can change. She works intensively with patients who have suffered brain injuries, usually as a result of automobile and other accidents. She’s particularly interested in the loss of “prospective memory,” which can hinder many victims of brain injuries. “Their trouble usually isn’t remembering what they had for breakfast yesterday, but rather remembering to do things in the future, like stopping to get groceries on the way home from work or calling someone they said they would call.”

            Working with the Brain Injury Association of Connecticut, colleagues at other area universities, and area hospitals, Raskin has recruited about 30 patients over the past seven years. She and her students typically work with each patient for about two years. In her lab in the basement of the Life Sciences Center, Raskin and her students conduct a series of tests on the patients, focused on documenting changes in prospective memory and other activity in the front of the brain. The tests track their ability to perform such tasks as paying attention and tracking time. Electro-encephalogram readings show the researchers where brain activity is actually taking place. The data is analyzed and the treatment phase, involving a series of memory-building exercises, lasts for six months to a year.

            So far, her work has shown exceptionally promising results. “Not only does prospective memory get better, but so has our patients’ use of it in their daily lives, which is the most rewarding thing.” A recently completed follow-up study indicated that all of the patients studied and treated got significantly better.  “When they were retested a year after completing treatment, their prospective memories were still functioning at the improved level, which suggests that they succeeded in reorganizing their brains.”

            Raskin’s work, which has been published widely, includes a 1999 book entitled Neuropsychological Management of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, published by Oxford University Press.

            For the past several years, Raskin and Priscilla Kehoe have also directed the College’s Health Fellows Program, a rigorous and intensive effort that places students for 30 hours per week of work with clinical care physicians on research projects, clinical services, educational seminars, and rounds at Trinity’s institutional neighbors, Hartford Hospital, Institute of Living, and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.

            Raskin is committed to working closely with undergraduates, involving them as developing colleagues. She has about 10 students working in her lab at any one time, ranging from first-year students to seniors working on theses. Like other Trinity scientists, Raskin views work in her lab as a sort of progressive apprenticeship, where undergraduates learn about science by doing it. They work with her on her projects, and eventually many wind up working closely with patients recovering from brain injuries. “Once somebody’s been in the lab for a while, they are assigned an individual patient, whose testing and treatment they supervise.”

            “I use the skills I learned from Sarah on a daily basis,” says Christina Palmese ‘98, who is now a doctoral student in neuropsychology at the City University of New York. “As a professor, she was very down-to-earth, easy to approach, and clear in her teaching style. Students often enjoyed her classes so much that we voluntarily helped each other with presentation preparations. Sarah’s style of teaching not only facilitates intellectual growth and freedom of ideas, but it also creates friendships.”

            Palmese did a senior thesis project with Raskin that ended up as a published article in Brain Injury, 2001 with Raskin as coauthor. “On that project, she let me work relatively independently, and I always felt that she treated me as an equal and not as a mere student,” Palmese notes.

            A crucial component of the student experience is working collectively on complex and challenging intellectual problems. Raskin’s lab team meets weekly, with students making presentations, going over data, brainstorming, and working on the design of tests. The laboratory “is one of the few places where I would agree that the education we provide in the sciences is really much different from that in other areas of the curriculum,” she says. “Students work in the lab with faculty members and with other students, and the lab really develops into a community of learning. Students are drawn in and that progressively deepens their motivation at every step of the process.”

            Raskin also believes strongly that rigorous education in neuroscience has value for students with all sorts of career goals. It’s not merely a preparation for graduate or medical school. “The scientific method is useful for just about everybody,” she says. “It trains people to think critically. Learning how to form a hypothesis and how to test it--that’s what we do
every day. You don’t have to want to be a doctor to find the brain an immensely compelling object of study.”

            Educated at Johns Hopkins University and the City University of New York, Raskin says that she really didn’t understand what liberal arts colleges do until she began teaching at Trinity. “This is simply a better way to educate people,” she says. “What I loved about Hopkins was that people would stand up at lectures and say, ‘here’s the latest thing. This is the frontier of knowledge.’ You felt like you were part of scientific progress. But Trinity also has that quality, as it turns out. The scientists here are all very active researchers.

            “And at Trinity students and faculty members get the best of both worlds. I feel this strongly. I get to do exciting research, and I get to know my students. I get to talk to them, often one-on-one, not in a lecture room with 250 other people.” In the larger scale setting of research university labs, undergraduates often work mostly with graduate students and often do “lots more scut work.”

            One result of the intensity and human scale of instruction at Trinity, she says, is that students often advance very quickly. “Our undergraduates are excellent. They are doing the things that I’d have graduate students do. Senior theses here are often at the level of master’s work.”

            However, students often have to adjust to the intellectual demands of lab-based learning in neuroscience. “Behavior is hard to put in a box. It’s messier than some other disciplines. You can’t control every variable. Everything can be changing at every moment. Beginning students often just want to get the right answer. It takes a while for students to get used to the fact that are so many unknowns. Not unknowable, just unknown. But eventually, that’s also what gets people so excited.”