Baycrest

G rowing up in New Zealand in a Samoan culture that reveres its elders has had a direct influence on Donna Rose Addis's distinguished career as a memory researcher. It also led her to her most recent position as a Canada 150 Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute (RRI). "My grandmother lived with us for 25 years from about age 70 and was really integrated into our family," she explains. "She's now 102 and cognitively well. That's one of the reasons I am drawn to learning more about the characteristics of people who are aging successfully. The focus in brain research is often on neurodegenerative diseases but there's so much to be learned from people who are well-adjusted and engaged in life and cognitively firing on all cylinders." She is particularly fascinated by autobiographical memory and what happens in the brain when people remember the past and when they imagine the future. While doing a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Daniel Schacter at Harvard University in 2007, Dr. Addis contributed to a groundbreaking discovery which found that the same networks of the brain are activated when people remember and when they imagine. "It shocked us," she says. "We didn't expect them to be so similar." The finding was named one of the Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2007 by Science, a prominent scientific journal. This led her in a new direction to understand how we are able to imagine and how it links to memory, she explains. What she discovered is that when we remember, we reconstruct what happened. "The details have been stored as fragments across our brain. Our brain locates the appropriate fragments at the same time and when activated simultaneously, you experience a memory. The same process is used to imagine things because you can pull in whatever details you want to create something new." As Dr. Addis explains it, being able to imagine is very important for our psychological well-being. Thinking ahead allows us to plan and to troubleshoot in advance of a particular situation. It helps decrease worry and increases the likelihood of using coping strategies. "It allows for more effective living and emotional regulation," she adds. Since individuals with depression often have difficulty coping and experience feelings of hopelessness, Dr. Addis believes this may be linked to the fact they have a harder time envisioning the future and imaging successful ways to deal with situations. Studying the link between memory & imagination Donna Rose Addis, Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging at Baycrest 6 "There are so many great initiatives going on at Baycrest..."

• Cover