Rachel Carlson

Strokes vary from person to person.

They can be so small, someone doesn't even know they had one.

Or a cause of death.

And in between, they can cause speech problems, numbness, paralysis.

And Paul studies the brain, mostly monkey brains.

But he does it in sort of an unusual way.

A lot of the times, neuroscientists look at groups of neurons, brain cells.

But Paul's lab uses single neurons, which lets them get finer details than they could by looking at the group.

In our conversation together, Paul compared the brain to a stadium.

And if you want to capture what's going on inside the stadium, you could just put a microphone in the middle of the field.

Paul, you study individual neurons in the brains of monkeys mostly.

How do you do that?

Got it.

So you do neurosurgery, you implant these wires, electrodes, and then they're measuring the little blips in the brain of the monkeys.

What kinds of studies do you do after you've implanted these electrodes?

So these are monkeys playing video games and you're watching what's going on in their brain, is that right?

That's right.

That's amazing.

And part of what you're doing is seeing how stroke impacts this area of the brain, right?

So how do you do that with the monkeys?