by Martha Tancock
Trent Communications

Over the past 20 years, neuropsychologist Gordon Winocur has received more than $1 million from various sources to research memory disorders in old and brain-damaged people. It's all part of the growing field of cognitive rehabilitation. Last month, the Medical Research Council (MRC) gave him another $384,025 to carry on for five more years.

         Winocur has taught psychology and conducted memory research at Trent since 1971. At the moment, his research activities are based at Trent and the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto. There, he and his research partners have explored the neuropsychology of memory disorders in old people and brain-damaged patients. One of their findings is that the elderly who live active, stimulating lives have better memories and can learn faster than their peers in old age homes. Biology plays a relatively small part in memory loss in normal aging. Winocur and his colleagues have identified two brain regions -- the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex -- as being particularly important and part of their research is concerned with specifying roles these areas of the brain play in memory.

         Trent was the only Maclean's-defined primarily undergraduate university in Canada to receive any MRC extended funding in the September round of competitions, announced in January. It was also one of only four non-medical universities in the country to win support. The lion's share of MRC's $48.9 million for 222 new and renewal, five-year grants went to five big medical research universities. The competition was stiff in a time of budget constraints. Only 216 of a total of 1,103 applications (19.5 per cent) for operating funds were successful and all received 20 per cent less than recommended by the peer-review committees "simply to keep more excellent laboratories open," said MRC president Harry Friesen in a Calgary speech last October. Of those, 76 of 182 applications (41.5 per cent) got renewed funding and 140 of 921 applications (15.2 per cent) got new funding.

         "Prof. Winocur's continuing success in extremely tough MRC competitions is a reflection of how highly regarded he is by colleagues in psychology and the health sciences areas," says Paul Healy, dean of research and graduate studies. "His work is novel, creative and fascinating. Clearly he is a world leader in new studies of the functioning of the human brain and the problem of memory loss, and he brings a great deal of credit to Trent through his research achievements."

         Winocur and University of Toronto's Morris Moscovitch will receive $76,805 per year for the next five years to further their research. They have discovered that a damaged hippocampus, deep in the centre of the brain, can interfere with a person's ability to acquire and store memories whereas a damaged prefrontal cortex impairs the ability to retrieve them. Being able to characterize which type of memory loss could "ultimately lead to therapeutic treatments," including the development of drugs and behavioral strategies to "selectively act on these different regions and enhance memory," said Winocur in a recent interview.

         Winocur's research is taking a major new thrust. He is studying old people's ability to retrieve memories from the remote past. Old people, such as patients with hippocampal lesions, have difficulty remembering recent experiences but no problem recalling really remote memories. Those with prefrontal cortex lesions have a hard time recalling recent and remote memories. "Therefore, because older people are likely to have varying degrees of impairment in both regions, it's reasonable that -- contrary to generally held opinions -- old people may, indeed, have problems with older memories. We want to study remote memories to find out if there is some damage or if [those parts of the brain that store] remote memories have really been spared."