McGaugh blazes on down his own path to keys of memory

His earliest work changed the way researchers look at memory. Now they see him as a missionary of science.

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

Not long ago, James L. McGaugh, PhD, who prides himself as an amateur woodworker, set himself to building a hobbyhorse for his youngest granddaughter. He used no plans. Instead, he says, he just envisioned what he wanted to create and relied on his skills to do the rest.

That's the way he approaches most aspects of his life, including his research on learning and memory: blazing his own path with confidence, focus and lots of enthusiasm.

Friends will give him how-to books on woodworking, but he never opens them. "It's the same with my experiments. I don't want someone to tell me how to do it, I want to figure it out myself."

Just as his own mental image of what a hobbyhorse should look like produced a handsome toy for his delighted granddaughter, his long and much talked about career as an innovative researcher was carved step by step from that same fiercely independent mindset.

One of his very first experiments as a graduate student in the late 1950s was groundbreaking in its methodology, its results bucking then-contemporary theories of how memories form. And when, at first, his now famous findings--that memories take time to form and can be strengthened with drugs during what he called a "consolidation" process--were rejected by the old guard (see sidebar) he admits he was "too naïve" to get discouraged.

He waited it out. And once the research establishment caught up with his ideas a few years later, he was off and running with a career that includes admission into the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as receipt of APA's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.

Throughout his career, instead of taking the easy route, he broke off on his own. At 32, rather than settle into an established academic setting, he built his own department of psychobiology at the University of California at Irvine. There his career flourished as researcher, teacher, mentor and administrator. He even rediscovered the joy of playing jazz on his clarinet and alto sax--the type of music he cherishes for its lack of rules and his ability to do with it what he wants.

He approaches all aspects of his life, whether it's work, family, skiing, music or wood working, with an intensity and enthusiasm that can be envied, say his colleagues, who recently celebrated his career at a Festschrift in his honor funded in part by APA.

McGaugh sums it up himself when he explains what motivates his research: "You've got to feel the rush of discovery in order to know what science is about. It's not what you see in the textbooks. It's the incredible feeling of awe and joy when you've learned something new."

The nature of human nature

McGaugh didn't always think of science as the path to discovery and learning. He started his college career at San Jose State College in 1949 as a drama and music major on a quest for an understanding of the "nature of human nature."

Several superb high school teachers had turned him on to the Greek plays--he owned and had read them all by his 18th birthday. And he thought that by studying those plays and music theory, he would discover why people are the way they are. He was terribly disappointed when his courses focused solely on the more mundane issues of stage production, he recalls.

That's when he found psychology, which seemed to provide the same kind of promise that the study of the Greek plays initially offered. In particular, graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley in the area of learning and memory seemed at its core to be about the nature of human nature.

"We are our memories," he explains. "Think about it. We arrive with very few dispositions and the rest are the things that we acquire in the world. All of our wishes, our thoughts, our dreams, our aspirations, our hopes--those are all based on memory."

A path less traveled

After three-and-a-half years in graduate school McGaugh was offered tenure-track positions at Cornell and Ohio State universities--arguably two of the top research psychology schools in the country at the time. But he turned them down, preferring instead to take a spot at his undergraduate alma mater, San Jose State.

"I figured I could do the research I wanted to without anyone looking over my shoulder," he says, adding that he had to set up a laboratory in his garage since the college had no lab space.

Then after a year in Rome and three years at the University of Oregon, he accepted an offer his trailblazing heart couldn't refuse: the opportunity to form the psychobiology department at Irvine.

"I was crazy to accept the job because I was much too young to be starting a department on my own," says McGaugh.

But the challenge suited him, and his career flourished. He built the Irvine department of psychobiology from the ground up, serving as founding chair from 1964 to 1967. Along with other administrative positions at the university, he was Executive Vice Chancellor--the university's CEO--from 1975 to 1982. In 1983, he created the university's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and has served as its director ever since. All along he maintained his laboratory, and has published a steady stream of research articles.

He also rediscovered his passion for music. While serving as Irvine's executive vice chancellor, the school wanted to spotlight McGaugh as "a human being, not just an administrator," he recalls with a chuckle. They asked him to perform a jazz solo at a university function.

"I hadn't touched my horn much in about 20 years," he says. "It took a while for me to get back into it, but I've been playing ever since."

Along with local public appearances he and a group of his neuroscience colleagues play together as "The Synaptic Plasticity Band" at meetings.

A blazing insight

It was at San Jose State, in McGaugh's garage, where he had what he describes as "one of those singular moments in personal history."

He wanted to understand how memories of learning get into long-term storage. So he was trying to see if he could manipulate the process with drugs. In a moment of what he calls "blazing insight," he decided to inject a stimulant drug into rats just after they learned something new--what he later dubbed the "post-training" technique. This allowed him to test whether the drug would enhance rats' memories for the task without harming their ability to learn the task in the first place.

"I did the first experiment and I'll be damned if it didn't work," he says, explaining that the drug successfully enhanced the rats' abilities to recall the task. If he injected the drug several hours after training, it had no effect on memory, implying that it takes the brain some time to get a memory into long-term storage.

"He discovered that there were cellular mechanisms operating that took time and could be interfered with," says University of Illinois learning and memory researcher William Greenough, PhD, who worked in McGaugh's lab as an undergraduate. "This was a fundamental shift in how people looked at memory."

Since that original set of findings, McGaugh's research has taken a largely linear course, building on that early work in a quest to discover why it is that significant experiences are remembered.

"Why is it that we remember pats on the back and insults, surprising experiences and final scores of basketball games, better than other experiences?" he asks.

After 40 years and countless experiments, McGaugh and his colleagues think they have some answers. They've discovered a mechanism by which stress hormones released in a precise area of the brain's amygdala act to boost memories for certain experiences
(see sidebar).

A modest missionary

Although it's rewarding to see his work move toward clinical significance, that's not what motivates him, admits McGaugh.

"What motivates me is the joy of discovery and the wonderful interactions that I have with students and colleagues," he says.

In fact, McGaugh keeps in touch with colleagues and students from around the world and is always available for career advice, to read over a manuscript or to discuss a bit of research.

In many ways, McGaugh "is part missionary," says University of Virginia psychologist Paul Gold, PhD, one of McGaugh's former graduate students and co-organizer with Greenough of the Festschrift. McGaugh has taken it upon himself to explain his research and its implications to students, colleagues and the general public.

"Sure part missionary," says McGaugh after some thought. "Maybe it's worth knowing that my father was a Methodist minister. I believe we have to pay back the public for the public support of the research that we do."

Along with his work, though, McGaugh is devoted to his family. He's been married to his wife, Becky, for 46 years and has three grown children and "five and two-thirds" grandchildren all of whom live with in 10 miles of his home. Just about every student he's had has eaten tacos at the McGaugh house or been to a pool party at some time or another.

At 67, he doesn't see himself slowing down, although he's begun allocating his time differently. After 26 years as co-editor of the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory he's relinquished his spot to Gold. And he plans to step down as director of the Irvine learning and memory institute as soon as a replacement is found.

"I'll be doing some different things, but probably not at a different pace because I don't know what a slow pace is," he says.

Besides, there's still so much more to learn because, despite all he and his colleagues know about memory, he's found that "modesty is the biggest virtue in all this. We get terribly excited about every finding but then we have to settle down and say 'in the big scheme of things every finding is just a little brick in the whole thing.'"

Further reading

* McGaugh, J.L. Emotional activation, neuromodulatory systems and memory strength. In: D.L. Schacter, J.T. Coyle, M-M Mesulam and L.E. Sullivan (Eds.), "Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past." (Harvard University Press, 1995).

* Cahill, L. and McGaugh, J.L. Mechanisms of emotional arousal and lasting declarative memory. Trends in Neuroscience, Vol. 21, p. 294­299, 1998.

* Quirarte, G.L., Roozendaal, B. and McGaugh, J.L. Glucocorticoid enhancement of memory storage involves noradrenergic activation in the basolateral amygdala. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 94, p. 14048­14053, 1997.

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