Theoretical physics and clinical neurology are as distant as black and white for you? Well, maybe. But then we need gray. Gray matters.
On June 11, I started writing for my first blog, the “M.A.D. Lab Blog”, which I have now moved to SciLogs. I have no problem being M.A.D. — nonetheless, I changed the name to Gray Matters. Because it does; more on that later.
To be clear: although I blog about migraine, I cannot provide or comment on help in migraine treatment — in particular medication or other forms of pain relief. So why am I writing this blog? In my first post, I wrote:
For good or bad, public understanding of science becomes more and more an essential prerequisite for both getting adequate funding of research activities and finding a permanent faculty position. To my mind this is actually a good thing, because the rapidly expanding Internet allows scientists to easily reach out to the public.
So you see, I am selfish — I am getting something back here. I also get emails every other week from people asking about their migraines and what I think. This blog actually saves me time, because I can refer to it.
What am I doing?
In short: migraine and stroke research. My current work focuses on problems at the interface of neurology and applied physics. My vision is to design control methods that prevent the progressive recruitment of cortical tissue — gray matter! — into the dysfunctional states that occur during migraine with aura.
So why “Gray Matters”? My work is on neural pattern formation in gray matter. Single cells do not get migraines, nor do they suffer strokes — yet mathematical modeling is often done at the single-cell level, on a timescale of milliseconds. That timescale matters most for normal brain function, but not for migraine or stroke, where minutes or even days are important.
Thus I investigate patterns of neural activity evolving over several centimeters and over long periods. These macroscopic scales are the scales of gray matter — the tissue of the cell bodies.
By the way: you may want to read my blog in German, Graue Substanz.