It is an incontrovertible fact that if we want to make progress in basic areas of medicine and biology, we are going to have to use animals.
Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.
It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that's attacked by Alzheimer's disease. So we can now use some of the basic understanding of this part of the brain to ask the simple question, 'What is going wrong with these special cells in the hippocampus at the very earliest stages?'
