What is the most difficult problem that you are trying to solve right now?

Question

Adam Cohen · Answer

OK, what is the most difficult problem that you're trying to solve right now? Well, I'm working, and my students are working on several different problems which none of us knows how to solve. And so we don't know which of these is going to be most difficult, which might be easy to solve, and which might be completely unsolvable. So I'll tell you about one problem that we're interested in. We're interested in trying to understand the three dimensional structures of memories in the brain. So if you think about what you had for breakfast this morning, there's some three dimensional representation of that memory in your brain and some set of biochemical changes in the neurons in your brain. But we have no idea what these maps are, or what are the rules that govern how memories are encoded or represented in the brain. My lab is working on trying to develop tools which we can use to map these changes. One approach that we're working on is to genetically engineer neurons to grow little protein fibers inside of each cell. And as these fibers grow, they incorporate marks of neuronal activity, a little bit like tree rings in a tree, which incorporate information about seasonal climate changes. And by incorporating within each neuron, a little tape recorder of its activity, we hope to be able to then look in the brains of animals, mice, which have learned different things, and to map the patterns of neural activity associated with different memories during the formation of the memory, during the recall of the memory, and during eventually maybe the forgetting of the memory, or changes in the memory.

Siri Chilazi · Answer

This is a fantastic question. And I would say one of the most difficult problems that I'm trying to solve is how to motivate people at the top of organizations to care about gender equality and about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to do the things that they need to do to advance it when they don't. Oftentimes what we see in organizations is there's a lot of excellent work happening at the bottom levels and even at the middle levels, but there can be a couple of critically placed individuals at or towards the top who don't get it, who don't buy in, and their reticence stymies the efforts of the whole rest of the organization and causes other really committed people to leave. I'm actually working on this problem with my co-author, [INAUDIBLE] Burnett, to articulate our answer to this question in a forthcoming book. So stay tuned.

Martin Surbeck · Answer

So one of the main problems or main questions I'm trying to answer right now is about what brings different groups together in a peaceful way. So what facilitates peace between different groups? And bonobos are particularly interesting in that way in that they really differ from chimpanzees and other primates. And that they're really collaborative and also tolerate the presence of other members. So I just try to figure out why do they do that and how do they do that.

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"What is the most difficult problem that you are trying to solve right now?"