When I was six, my pet mouse Maisie and I were inseparable. My grandmother sewed “Maisie” pockets on all my jumpers and tee shirts for her.

My family still find it amusing that over 20 years on, I still spend all day with mice. However these mice are a little different from Maisie.

I work at The Florey and in our laboratory we are testing how exposing mice to stimulating or enriched environments improves their memory and mood and causes changes in their brains.

We commonly use the phrase use it or lose it.  Most people associate this with the physical.  Exercise regularly or lose your fitness.  Though, the same applies to your brain.  Use your brain regularly or lose your brain.  And just like you need to vary the types of exercise you do, your brain also benefits from diverse experience.

Enriched mice are housed in large cages with toys to interact with, ladders to climb, ropes to hang off, and running wheels to run in. We change their cage environment frequently, adding new toys and creating new obstacles for the mice to encounter.  We also remove them from their already large cage once a day and place them in a huge chamber with many different levels, and 3D complexity. Its a bit like a mouse playground.

I work with mice that are poor learners.  I test their learning and memory by using a maze that relies on a mouse’s ability to use cues around the room to remember the quickest path to the finish.  Just like you would use the eureka towers to orientate yourself in southbank if you were new to Melbourne. Mice that use these cues well, get faster and faster and make less mistakes every time they have a run in the maze.

I compare mice living in enriched environments to those in non stimulating ones, without toys and in a much smaller space. While the mice living in the non stimulating environment struggle in the maze, the enriched mice perform the task, improving significantly more every day.  After living in a stimulating environment, mice that are poor learners perform just as well as mice with normal learning ability.  An environment with constant novelty and challenges improved their ability to learn.

What do you do to exercise your brain?

I spend a lot of my work day with my mice. I am currently training them on a memory task that involves them selecting a correct picture on a touch-sensitive computer screen. They are rewarded for a correct choice with strawberry milkshake!

You can see a video of mice learning on a touchscreen here (if your school allows youtube videos). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGtxFpicXV0

I also wear a white lab coat and isolate DNA, look down microscopes at neurons, and measure small protein molecules in brain tissue.

If I’m not hanging out with my mice or in my labcoat, I am either talking about science in meetings, writing my results up for publication in scientific journals (this is how we share our findings with people overseas) or teaching my students in the lab.

In July I flew to Barcelona in Spain to attend a conference with another 6000 neuroscientists from around the world. Conferences are a great way of making sure you know the newest findings. It’s a bonus when they are held in exotic locations.

The brain is the most complex thing in the universe, its no wonder we struggle to understand why our brains fail to work properly sometimes.

An art curator, film maker, web designer and myself, a neuroscientist have joined forces to set up a collaboration between neuroscientists and artist. The idea is that artists will generate pieces of art inspired by the neuroscientists work.  An exhibition will allow the general public to come and explore the brain-art and ask questions about the brain.

We need funding to hold this exhibition and to provide support to the artists for materials.

We hope that this exhibition will change minds, will challenge both the neuroscientists and artists and allow people to learn about the inner workings of the brain from a different angle.