Welcome Dr. Lee. May we begin with a brief overview of your research?
My lab studies the function of several brain areas, specifically the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and hippocampus, that we think are important for high level cognition with roles in planning. We (humans) accomplish most of our objectives by thoughtfully choosing a sequence of actions. As the complexity of planning increases, many different choices are possible, for example, when you try to travel from the Homewood campus to the medical campus. The best path or route could change, unpredictably, depending upon variables like weather and traffic and whether you can share a ride with someone, and so on. So, my lab is particularly interested in how the brain combines all these different types of information when you are planning a sequence of actions in the future. That’s our lab’s central topic.
What problem are you trying to solve, or are you creating new knowledge?
We know very little about how these different brain areas are involved when we are making complex plans for the future. That’s because the methods that we can use to study the functions of these brain areas are actually still fairly limited. The human brain has around 80 billion neurons, and planning requires these neurons to exchange information related to sensory stimuli, the animals’ goals, and their previous experiences. To fully understand how these brain areas contribute to coming up with a good plan, you need to study how the individual neurons send and receive information from other neurons in real time during planning. This is very hard to do in human brains, even though humans are really good at making complex plans, because without using invasive methods, the resolution of the information that you can get about neural activities is quite limited.
We can study the neural mechanism of planning using methods such as EEG or fMRI, but to do this well you need to use animal models, especially animal models that can make complex plans. So that’s why we use non-human primates, in this case, monkeys, in our research. And to do that, we have to train the monkeys in a task where we can manipulate some key variables such as the complexity of the problems, time constraints, how quickly they have to do this to receive their reward, whether they’re going to be rewarded, or whether there’s an opportunity cost. We like to manipulate all of these variables in a laboratory setting, and we also want to record the electrical activities of many neurons, as many as possible. These are all relatively difficult techniques to implement in the lab, but by combining these methods, we can make discoveries about the functions of these somewhat mysterious brain areas about which we know very little.
Who are your collaborators here at Hopkins or elsewhere?
I have many collaborators both within Hopkins and outside the university. At Hopkins, my closest collaborator is Chris Fetsch, also in the Mind/Brain Institute. We started collaborating a few years ago because we realized that both of us are really interested in decision-making, especially the complex decision-making that requires planning where you have to use your knowledge about the environment. We wanted to design a rigorous behavioral paradigm where we can study the interplay of your goal and current state as well as your knowledge of the environment.
I began working closely with Adam Charles (Department of Biomedical Engineering) recently because the kind of analytical framework that his lab is developing will be very applicable to analyze the neural activity that we are measuring. And I also have a few other long-term collaborators who are computational neuroscientists such as Weiji Ma at NYU, Se-bum Paik at KAIST, as well as John Murray and Alireza Soltani at Dartmouth. All of them are actually physicists doing computational neuroscience research. My collaborations with them have been very important.
What inspired you to pursue this field?
When I was a child, I wanted to be a physicist, but then I became curious about our minds and behaviors and what makes us humans special. Then I realized that all our mental experiences, such as thoughts and emotions, must have some physical basis. When I was in college, it was really exciting to realize that all our mental experiences must, somehow, be based upon some physical processes inside the brain. It’s obviously very different from what you observe in our other, external physical world. So, what aspect of those physical processes, be they electrical or chemical processes in the brain, gives rise to these rich mental experiences. So that’s what I was interested in. Initially, I studied visual neurophysiology to try to understand how visual perception arises from the neural activity in the brain. I also studied motor control, how the brain controls complex movement patterns. Ultimately, what really interests me are the important features of neural activity that make our complex thought possible, such as when we’re choosing our strategies and making complex plans.
Did anyone, in particular, inspire you?
I used to dream of becoming a polymath, someone who has extraordinary skills in multiple areas. One polymath who has inspired me a great deal is the Russian composer, Alexander Borodin. He was a medical doctor, a chemist, and also an accomplished composer. Apparently, there is a chemical reaction named after him, the Hunsdiecker–Borodin reaction, but he is also a very accomplished composer. He wrote beautiful chamber music and orchestral pieces that I enjoy, and it is pretty amazing for someone to have all those skills. Those are the people I really envy, someone who has the passion and patience and the talents to excel and achieve significant things in multiple disciplines.
What are some of the skills and qualities that a student would need to succeed in a lab such as yours?
I think the skills and the passions are important for doing science in any discipline, not just in labs doing neurophysiological experiments in non-human primates. In general, if you want to be a successful researcher, you need to have good math and analytical skills. You have to have passion for the subjects that you want to study, and then you need to have the patience to learn all the methods that are necessary to answer the questions you hope to answer. You need a lot of patience because you will get frustrated. Things happen, and they usually do not work the first time.
In fact, given that we are trying to understand the most complicated functions of the brain areas that are really poorly understood, the experiments become increasingly complicated. For us, that means that we spend a lot of time debugging the program, trying to find a way to train the animals more efficiently, and fixing broken equipment. It’s a miracle that in some cases things actually work. You need a lot of patience and persistence.
I also wanted to mention that a lot of young scientists and trainees tend to focus too narrowly. They often think that if they are doing a good job with the particular research project, then that’s all they need. But life is much bigger than that. I think they should feel free to spend time on the other things they’re passionate about, because that’s the source of energy that makes everything possible, including research. If you like music, then I think you should feel free to take time to learn new instruments or new pieces. If you’re interested in painting, then you should feel free to spend some time to further develop your techniques and interest. And if you’re interested in history, then you should read interesting books and travel. There are so many different things you can do in the world, and I think that is important, good for your mental health and for inspiration.
What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I have a few hobbies; one of them is making electronic music (see video below – @ungteoriz). I have a recording studio in my home, and I enjoy learning to play new instruments, mostly different kinds of synthesizers at the moment. Another hobby is woodworking, which I started because I needed to build a lot of furniture for my recording studio. I spent time, especially during the pandemic, organizing my recording studio better. I enjoy playing the keyboard, a little bit of guitar, and I learned to play the drums a couple of years ago.
Video Credit: Daeyeol Lee producing a music video / Daeyeol Lee
Image Credit: Hexin Liang (graduate student in my lab) while she was talking to the Bodian Seminar Speaker, Prof. Terry Stanford from Wake Forest University / Daeyeol Lee, April 2024