Stories of Women in Neuroscience · Stories of WiN

Dr. Nicole Rust

·59 min·4 clips

Rust says the brain is not a domino chain, and treatments need "control nodes," not just broken parts.

Stories of Women in Neuroscience opens with Melissa Franch welcoming Dr. Nicole Rust. Rust is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies how our brains remember what we've seen. And more recently, she's been writing a book called *Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders and How We Can Change That*. Rust says there is a very clear moment when she became a neuroscientist. She grew up in small-town USA, in northern Idaho, and that early setting is part of the story she tells. The conversation treats her career as an origin story as much as a research profile. Franch asks about the first time Rust became interested in the brain. Rust answers by describing how that interest became a vocation. She also explains that she thinks of herself as a curiosity-driven foundational researcher. That matters to her because she sees basic work as the ground that later treatment work has to stand on. The discussion then turns toward the book and the question behind it. Rust says she became curious and concerned about what was holding back knowledge in the field. She wondered whether researchers were studying the wrong things or thinking about the brain in the wrong way. She did not begin the book with a final answer. She began with a question and a suspicion that turned out to be incomplete. The conversation also gets into levels of analysis in neuroscience. Rust talks about information processing in populations of neurons and how information changes from one brain area to the next. She contrasts that with work at the molecular level, brain-wide imaging such as fMRI, and behavior. That comparison helps explain why her perspective on neuroscience is broad rather than tied to one method. The episode follows how a scientist builds a life around a question and then turns that question into a book.

As heard by us

A clear-eyed look at curiosity-driven neuroscience and the stubborn problem of brain cures.

Dr. Nicole Rust traces a path from northern Idaho to a question that still hangs over neuroscience: how the brain remembers what it has seen, and why the field has not cracked brain disorders.

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Follow a neuroscientist from northern Idaho as she traces why brain cures remain elusive.

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