April 5, 2018:
This week’s interview is answered by Tomás Ryan, an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland. From knowing Tomás personally, I can say that he is not only one of the most promising scientists in memory research, but also a genuine supporter of efforts in science communication, equality and early career support. I am therefore particularly happy to share this interview with you this week. Read more
February 8, 2018:
Visiting fellow A/Prof Tomás Ryan spoke about memories, amnesia and creating false recall.
January 27, 2018:
Jonathan talks about the science of memories with Dr. Tomás Ryan, the wonderful world of Fungi with Professor Nik Money and Newsround with Lara Dungan and Shane Bergin. Listen here
February 3, 2018:
People tend to think of memories as deeply personal, ephemeral possessions — snippets of emotions, words, colors and smells stitched into our unique neural tapestries as life goes on. But a strange series of experiments conducted decades ago offered a different, more tangible perspective. The mind-bending results have gained unexpected support from recent studies. Read more
November 2016:
What if the missing memories in amnesia were actually retrievable?
After studying in Dublin and Cambridge, Tomás Ryan found his way to the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Tomás dedicates his work to understanding the neuroarchitecture of memory. Through a series of experiments where the memory engrams of mice were directly manipulated, Tomás and his collaborators discovered that memories thought to disappear in mouse models of amnesia might actually remain intact and are potentially retrievable. Challenging conventional notions of memory storage, retrieval, and brain damage, this work sets the stage for potential memory recall in patients with amnesia due to trauma, stress, alcohol and drug abuse, dementia, and aging. Tomás is currently a Senior Research Fellow at MIT, and an incoming Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.
March 2017:
Tomás Ryan (Trinity College Dublin & MIT) discusses how the brain should be considered from an evolutionary perspective rather than a design one — questioning whether memory is like information processed by computers.
June 22, 2017:
WIRED: Tech Metaphors are Holding Back Brain Research
STARING DOWN A packed room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown San Francisco this March, Randy Gallistel gripped a wooden podium, cleared his throat, and presented the neuroscientists sprawled before him with a conundrum. “If the brain computed the way people think it computes,” he said, “it would boil in a minute.” All that information would overheat our CPUs.
December 7, 2016:
By José Miguel Diniz.
As a part of the 3rd BEB Symposium, in Coimbra, Portugal, José Miguel Diniz and Ana Cunha, from Porto Biomedical Journal, interviewed MIT Research Professor Tomás Ryan on some topics regarding your research on memory and engram cells, delving into the problems of the current scientific investigation, as well as some possible therapeutic applications.
Professor Tomás John Ryan is a senior investigator in MIT and HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute). His research is mainly about the mechanisms of memory storage and about the memory recall. His investigation in this field is deemed a breakthrough in neuroscience, due to new perspectives on the concept of memory, memory formation and anterograde amnesia – as found in Alzheimer’s disease.
October 2016
Video forthcoming – please check back soon.