| When the
student got up to speak, Angus MacDonald should have been ready.
But he wasn't.
As a young assistant professor of psychology, MacDonald knew about
drug addiction. He had discussed with his class how the nice feeling
that accompanies the early stages of addictive drug-taking soon
becomes perverted into an awful craving. But when this student he
knew talked about what it's like to go down that road, it affected
MacDonald deeply.
“What took me aback was the proximity of it, that it can happen
to anybody,” says MacDonald. “He was an excellent student who thought
deeply about issues, and he was a coke addict. But [his experience
shows] that you can find your way back.”
Something goes wrong in the human brain as it spirals into addiction,
just as in schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness. MacDonald's
multipronged efforts to find causes and treatments of such disorders
led to his being named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor in 2006.
MacDonald is a hit with both undergraduate and graduate students.
With his graduate students, he's made a humorous music video to
the Dandy Warhols' indie hit “Scientist,” and he plays drums in
the clinical psychology program's rock cover band. In his statistics
class, he emphasized the introduction of an off-beat topic with
an original rap song performed with his students. Each year, he
takes students on a canoe trip to the St. Croix River and encourages
them to think expansively.
For senior Danielle Huber and former undergraduate advisee James
Porter, MacDonald stood out for his willingness to give students
time.
“He gave me opportunities to talk about projects I was interested
in rather than [just] assigning something,” says Huber.
“Working on my senior thesis, we had weekly meetings,” recalls
Porter, who now manages MacDonald's laboratory. “I'd talk to undergraduates
doing projects with other advisers and they'd say, ‘I e-mailed my
adviser a week ago and haven't heard back.'”
“His work runs from mental disorders to how the brain produces
them and how genetics plays a role,” says graduate student Melissa
Johnson. “I'm consistently surprised by how much he knows about
all these areas and how he can put them all together in a research
program. Not many people can do that.”
MacDonald doesn't confine his intellectual pursuits to science.
He maintains a keen interest in Eastern philosophy and Buddhist
meditation, two subjects he encountered in India during an undergraduate
year abroad.
In his search for the roots of mental illness, MacDonald asks one
big question: Where does madness happen, and why? He focuses his
search in the prefrontal cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of
the front third of the brain. This thin tissue allows people to
perform many sophisticated tasks, such as consciously altering routines
or generating new responses to fit new situations. Using a scanner
at the University's Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, MacDonald
analyzes patterns of brain activity associated with certain tasks
in healthy subjects, schizophrenia patients, and relatives of patients.
“We see abnormalities in schizophrenia patients, and there's a
reliably higher proportion of relatives of patients who also show
abnormalities,” he says.
Lately, MacDonald has begun studying the brain mechanisms involved
in human joy and impulsivity, which include activity in the more
primitive midbrain region. The midbrain may be involved with substance
abuse, he says, or with the inability to get pleasure from being
with other people, which is characteristic of people with schizophrenia.
One thing that interests him is what happens when people have to
control an emotional response. In collaboration with colleagues,
MacDonald will be studying this by scanning brain activity when
subjects are shown emotionally loaded pictures—either happy or sad—and
asked to either ignore or not ignore what they see. Understanding
emotional control or breakdown may one day lead to better ways of
helping people through life's ups and, especially, downs.
By studying functions of the cerebral cortex and the midbrain,
plus connections between these two large areas, MacDonald is stretching
his own mind and conveying this adventure to students. He hopes
they will find ways to apply the knowledge as they come into their
own as citizens and scientists.
“The challenge of turning data from humble neurons into a meaningful
story about how to lead your life is one of the wonderful things about
being at the University,” he says.
By Deane Morrison
Reprinted with permission from the Spring 2007 edition of M
, the University's alumni quarterly.
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