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NOHAM WOLPE, MD PHD


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WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE!



I am a clinician scientist, working in clinical psychiatry and neuroscience
research.
My broad interest is in how mental health factors affect our actions.



NOW RECRUITING

We are recruiting MSc/PhD/postdocs for a research project looking at how people
perceive effort.
Please contact me directly for informal enquiries!



RECENT WORK


HOW DOES THE PRE-SUPPLEMENTARY MOTOR AREA EXERT INHIBITION?

Our recent work (full manuscript) shows that the pre-supplementary motor area
exerts inhibitory control over our voluntary action by dynamically adjusting the
thresholds for making a response.



Mini-talk I gave about these findings at the 'EPS Workshop on Decision Making in
Voluntary Action' in 2021.





LEARNING NEW TRICKS

As we grow older, it becomes more difficult to learn new skills. This holds true
for skills that are purely “mental”, like learning a new language, but also for
motor skills that involve movement, like learning how to ride a bike.
Neuroscience research has classically separated these two types of learning
into: 1) ‘explicit’ learning, which is considered a conscious and deliberate
process of attaining new information, and which relies on a brain structure
called the hippocampus. 2) ‘implicit’ learning, which happens automatically
without conscious awareness, and which depends on a brain structure called the
cerebellum. Research has shown that as we grow older, our explicit learning is
not as good as it used to be when we were younger. By contrast, implicit
learning remains largely unaffected by our age. However, these observations
could not explain why in old age it is similarly difficult to learn both mental
and motor skills. A new Cam-CAN study shows that as we get older, motor skill
learning shifts to rely more on explicit learning and its brain structure.
Changes in the hippocampus, but not in the cerebellum, explain why for many
people, this type of learning gets more difficult as they get older. While the
reason for this shift is unclear, it might help us design new learning methods
for older people that will encourage them to use their intact implicit learning,
so that they can easily continue to learn new tricks.

Full details in:

Wolpe N, Ingram JN, Tsvetanov KA, Henson RN, Wolpert DM; Cam-CAN, Rowe JB
(2020). Age-related reduction in motor adaptation: brain structural correlates
and the role of explicit memory. Neurobiology of Aging. 90:13-23. doi:
10.1016/j. neurobiolaging.2020.02.016.