Future plans

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Anatomy of memory
One of my plans is to obtain more knowledge about brain areas affected by serotonergic and cholinergic manipulations. In the near future, I hope to record fMRI activity during memory processing under the influence of medication such as biperiden, rivastigmine, and citalopram. I am planning to use perfusion/arterial spin labeling, because this gives a more direct measure than BOLD does. This is important if you are possibly changing blood flow not only due to cognitive processes, but also because of the medication you are using.

Epigenetics and memory
One of the major future plans our research group is to find out to what extent epigenetic changes affect our memory. The genetics of memory have received much attention lately, but the role of certain genes is not really large. Epigenetics is about switching on and off the genes and it is possible that this plays a much larger role than the genes themselves. We are still in the process of getting funding for this initiative, because we will need a lot of money for this project. Our plans would be to examine various types of memory, but also to record (f)MRI during cognitive processing in a group of 2000 healthy volunteers.