Part 1 of a 4-part series on women in STEM
Professor Anina Rich setting up an electroencephalogram (EEG) test. Credit: supplied
In a world hooked on screens, cognitive neuropsychologist Professor Anina Rich wants us to be more mindful about where we direct our attention.
Rich focusses on attention, and “how the brain integrates information across the senses (including in synaesthesia) because this is integral to everything else – memory, awareness, our experience of the world around us, our ability to learn and connect. It all rests on this process of selecting what’s important from the bombardment of information coming into our senses.”
“The choices we make about where we deploy our attention (and who we allow to control it – think big tech sending notifications all the time…) shape our experiences, knowledge, understanding,” she said.
“I’m passionate about getting people to be more mindful about where they allocate this invaluable resource.”
Enraptured by the brain
At university Rich was lucky to receive a scholarship to support her passion for learning. A first-year science degree at Monash University, in 1995, was followed by a year of backpacking around Australia. Then back to Uni, majoring in physiology and psychology with a genetics minor.
Why psychology? “I just had a vague notion that I wanted to help people, and I suppose psychology was the section of my science degree I thought most in line with that.”
Her third year was to be truly transformative, thanks to lectures given by renowned behavioural neuroscientist, Professor John Bradshaw.
Bradshaw, gave introductory lectures on neuropsychology, focussing on patients who had suffered brain damage in particular areas of the brain.
“He described what such damage does to the brain, how that relates in a certain ‘constellation of symptoms’,” says Rich, “and what that says about that part of the brain.”
She was hooked.
Serendipity and synaesthesia
Rich went on to do her psychology honours at Monash working with Professor Jason Mattingley, a former Bradshaw postdoc. Her project focussed on synaesthesia, a choice shaped by serendipity.
Bradshaw was being interviewed by a journalist about synaesthesia and invited Mattingley and Rich to sit-in. At the end of the interview the researchers asked the journalist to put a note at the bottom of the article, saying “please get in touch if you have synaesthesia”. They weren’t hoping for much, given an estimate of just 1 synaesthete in 25,000 Australians.
One hundred and seventeen letters arrived in the first week, all from synaesthetes saying: “I didn’t know this was a thing,” says Rich. An honours project, right there.
For most people, light becomes sight and sound becomes hearing, and that’s it. Each sense provides a range of predictable inputs defined by the sensor involved. But a synaesthete’s world is different. Their senses mix in unusual ways. A musical note or a letter might trigger a flash of colour that only they can see; a word might deliver a smell or taste. That’s just their experience of the world.
There are at least 164 different types of synaesthesia, with new variants being discovered every day. Synaesthesia is a phenomenon, not a disorder, says Rich.
Her honours project turned out to be the first group study on synaesthesia. She discovered that letter-colour synaesthetes were slower at identifying a colour if the letter shown didn’t match the one their brain normally associated with that colour. Say ‘B’ produces a flash of blue. A synaesthete shown a red ‘B’ would be slower at naming the colour than a non-synaesthete. This gave an objective index of synaesthesia and demonstrated that the colours appear involuntarily, she says.
She also found that the colour association happened only if subjects have enough time to look at the letter. The effect disappeared if all they got was a flash of the letter, meaning letter identity had to be unconsciously processed. This, Rich says, suggests that synaesthesia depends on conscious recognition of the letter.
Another major discovery that year was Rich’s passion for research. “This was my first experience with synaesthesia, being able to ask questions and design experiments to answer them was really exciting.”
The work was published in Nature, one of the most respected journals in science.
Then, in 2000, Rich started a PhD at Melbourne University, supervised by Mattingley, who had also made the move. At the same time, she did master’s in clinical neuropsychology, but by the end she realised the clinic wasn’t for her — “the research was just too much fun”, she says.
Her PhD focussed on the role of attention. “I’m fascinated by the way that our perception works, and in particular the role of attention, because it underpins so much of what we do. And so, I guess that’s a theme that goes through my research. In my PhD, I really looked at the role of attention in the binding that happens in synaesthesia.”
This piece was painted by synaesthete Cassandra Miller while listening to the song“All Along The Watchtower” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Credit: Cassandra Miller (CC BY-SA 4.0)
An inclusive lab
By 2007, 2 years out of her PhD, Rich was starting her own lab at as a postdoc research fellow at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University. Since then, she has progressed through lecturer and associate professor positions to full professor in the same department, now called the School of Psychological Sciences. Currently she is an ARC Professorial Future Fellow.
Rich had an unusual upbringing. Her parents had a place at the Moora Moora Co-operative Community at Mount Toolebewong, out past the Yarra Vally, an hour and a half north-east of Melbourne.
Moora Moora, formed in 1974, is one of the oldest, intentional, sustainable communities in Australia.
At a time when environmental concerns weren’t mainstream, her parents decided that living sustainably was more important than her dad’s reasonably well-paying job. The family move to Moora Moora, with young kids, was out of determination to be part of the solution, she says.
It gave her a “strong belief in the importance of community and human connections, fairness, justice, and equality, that has led to a strong theme of social justice and inclusion”.
Her lab is based on inclusiveness and diversity, she says.
“I set high standards for rigorous science as well as caring about my people – one can be an inclusive leader and still do good science. Mentoring & collaborating with my postdocs and students to do really good research is a wonderful part of my job.”
“I really model my supervision on Jason’s [Mattingley]. He was a really wonderful mentor and supervisor for me.”
Now, Rich is involved in mentoring others beyond her lab, ranging from Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders, to those from refugee backgrounds and at-risk scholars, to other young researchers from the Pacific region.
“Alongside my research, I have always had an active interest in pursuing activities relating to social justice,” she said.