For more than three decades, Dr. Michael Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. In addition to teaching and doing research at the University of California, San Francisco, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of numerous awards and prizes. Dr. Merzenich's work has been covered in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes II, CBS Evening News and Good Morning America. He earned his BS degree at the University of Portland and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins.

What's the most exciting thing you're working on these days?

I've been working with psychiatrists from Yale and UCSF on intensive training for individuals who have developed schizophrenia. I can't tell you exactly what we're doing, but we're trying to drive the brain in a corrective direction.

We've trained quite a few active schizophrenics, and we have had big effects on them. The question is, can we prevent this illness from happening in the first place, or change the probability that a young person will collapse into it if they have an inherited weakness for this condition. I'm excited because I think to use the brain's natural resources to help fix itself so that it basically doesn't suffer a catastrophe like this would be just a fabulous thing.

The other thing I'm having lots of fun with has to do with the brain and predictions. It's a little bit hard to explain, but let me try. If you hear something or see something that's familiar, you immediately make associations to other things that relate to it. You predict what should happen next.

A simple example would be that after just a few notes, you know that you are listening to "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." Your brain is making a forward prediction, which it continually does each moment in time. You can think of these predictions as being the motor that drives our stream of consciousness. As you listen to someone talk, you're continuously making predictions about the little pieces of successive sound. And the completeness and accuracy of what you hear largely comes from those predictions.

We know that in many human maladies, this machinery is broken. It's catastrophically broken in a psychotic patient, who can't control predictions at all. We've been studying these processes in rats, and we can now see how it works. And we can also see how to improve it.