In Profile: Matt Wilson
It was just another day in the lab in 1991 when Matt Wilson first heard something that no one had ever heard before: brain waves from a dreaming rat. Wilson, now a professor at MIT and a researcher at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, had set up an experiment where he recorded neural signals from rats' brains as they ran a maze in the lab. One day, he left the rats hooked up to the recording equipment after they finished running the maze, while he sat at his bench working on some data analysis. Soon enough, he started to recognize some of the patterns he was hearing from the resting rats' brains. "Suddenly I realized I could hear brain activity that sounded like the animal was running through the maze, but the animal was asleep," he recalls. Wilson's groundbreaking discovery that the sleeping rat brain replays the rat's...