Now director of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, McAllister continues to investigate how the brain’s nerve cells - called neurons - find each other, connect and disengage. As a graduate student in the 1990s studying developmental neurobiology, she was drawn to the question of how the brain is built: how individual brain cells in a growing fetus somehow organize themselves into an organ capable one day of pondering the mysteries of life. Kimberley McAllister has been fascinated by the human brain since college. By sending electrical signals from nerve cell to nerve cell within a great network of connections, the brain creates thoughts as mundane as “Where are my keys?” or as profound as “I think, therefore I am.” That’s because it’s the connections between those cells that make the brain so amazing. No thoughts, no worries, no wonder or awe.
If you were to take a human brain and toss it in a blender - not that you should - the resulting slurry of cells wouldn’t be special in the way that the human brain is.
