I'm Jonathan Ashmore. I'm burnin cats professor of biophysics here at University College London and I also happen to be president of the physiological society. This laboratory studies the cellular mechanisms of hearing and in particular were interested in the sensory cells of the inner ear and particularly mammalian inner ear. Because we want to know how the cells and the molecules which control hearing work most of the work that I've been involved in. I suppose over the last sort wente years has been concerned with how the ear amplifies sound and it turns out that inside your inner ear you have a biological amplifier and that depends on a cluster of cells which can modify the mechanics of a cop clear and out to find the sound. Oh it is much more exciting and I think another key reason is because in physiology and neuroscience you're in control essentially of everything all the way through from thinking about the experiment through to designing the experiment itself to the equipment and to even doing the experiment so very often you can think like a important experiment in the morning and you might not actually know the other bit of like what the answer is by the end of the day. And that's that sort of excitement exciting. It's very different from the world of high energy physics where you might have to wait. Decades to know what the outcome of the experiment actually was the changes in ultra neuroscience. Well there's a big one which at the moment nobody actually knows. What is the molecule that converts sound into an electrical signal. We don't know the transduction channel. There's a lot of labs looking for that one but they haven't found it yet. There may be several channels of course and then the other problems then concern what the brain is actually doing with that information. So there's been a huge amount of interest in thinking about everything from early processing of sound signals up to more complex tasks such as idle speech recognition work and try to link that essentially the networks of neurons that you find in the brain and the brain stem to that is rather more complicated.

Perceptual tasks physiology is a very interesting but demanding discipline to study. It's interesting because it covers almost everything we want to know about. Our animals and ourselves actually work. It's very demanding because very often you can't understand how the individual parts work unless you put into context and so therefore you need to spread your knowledge around many different topics before you have an overall grass and so my advice really is if you're up-and-coming physiologist it's just to keep your eyes open. Don't just focus on your particular narrow field but do have a look into adjacent fields in physiology from time to time because there's all sorts of wonderful things happening for example. I mean my own work rather reluctantly. I find myself having to teach the kidney to medical students and it turns out that some of the structures in the kidney some of the molecules in the kidney too I'd like to get critical for our understanding of how the cells in the ear work so there's huge amounts of cross fertilization that happens between all these different fields with even within the physiology you.