Patricia Goldman-Rakic

N euroscience, by its very nature, incorporates most other scientific disciplines in a quest to discover the roots of such complex functions as sensation, movement, emotion, and cognition. But it is a rare individual who has the courage to embrace multiple disciplines to fundamentally advance understanding of the relationship between brain and behavior. The career and life of Patricia Goldman-Rakic, cut short in late July this year by a tragic accident, embodied the passion of discovery and the daring of a scientific pioneer. Many tributes have been written about Pat's accomplishments: from her election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and her tenure as president of the Society for Neuroscience to her strong publication record of over 250 articles. Here's a view of Pat Goldman-Rakic, the research scientist. Pat's multidisciplinary approaches were focused on defining the mechanisms of working memory, the kind of memory we use to remember a telephone number as we reach for the receiver. Pat often used the metaphor " blackboard of the mind " to describe the essence of working memory. It is, fundamentally, the ability to hold information " online " during the processing of a task that requires retrieval and manipulation of information at successive steps to perform associations with new ideas and incoming data. The key issue for Pat, as it is for those who work in the field of cognitive neuroscience in general, was to determine how mental representations are held in the brain and how such information can be accessed. She believed that understanding the essence of working memory would lead naturally to a new perspective on neuropsychiatric disorders that disrupt the central processes of cognition, such as schizophrenia. Pat was not alone in attributing an important role in working memory to the frontal lobes, an area of the neocortex largely expanded in primates. She was, however, rare in her unwavering belief that the key to understanding something as complex as working memory lies in understanding the interactions of multiple elements found in this cortical region. These cellular players include driving inputs from the thalamus and from other areas of the cortex, output neurons, local cells that suppress outputs, and also the neuromodulatory systems, the monoamines, that influence the processing of neurophysiological information by dampening or enhancing function. For Pat, there was no shortcut around this complex of biological elements to understanding cognition—one simply had to …