Joe Z. Tsien remembers as a student wandering into a lab where neurons were being monitored and hearing the machine-gun sound of the cells at work.

"When they fire, they make this tat-tat-tat-tat sound," he said. "You can hear it over the speaker. That was fascinating. That was the moment I got hooked."

Dr. Tsien has taken that monitoring to a whole new level and his work in how the brain forms memories is opening up exciting possibilities, officials said.

He recently joined Medical College of Georgia as the co-director of the new Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute.

His recruitment from Boston University was aided by the Georgia Research Alliance, which made him one of its Eminent Scholars and helped fund half of the recruitment and start-up package that lured him to MCG.

"He's very much on the forefront of both the science and, importantly, the technology," said GRA President Michael Cassidy. "He's developing a very sophisticated technology platform that will enable him and his lab to really probe the inner workings of memory and cognition and how the brain works."

Dr. Tsien helped develop sensors that could monitor more than 200 mouse neurons in the hippocampus of the brain, which is central to memory formation. That allows him to piece out how the mice responded to dramatic events, such as shaking their cages.

Dr. Tsien identified key "cliques" of neurons that were associated with different aspects of the memory, such as the kind of motion or where it took place, according to the story Dr. Tsien wrote for the magazine Scientific American .

The memories followed a certain pattern and in remembering the neurons were activated in a certain pattern, Dr. Tsien wrote. This code is the key to understanding and more importantly accurately measuring memory formation, he said.

"The ability to monitor the memory code is hugely important because you typically assess the memory or brain function by behavior," he said. "But behavior is notoriously unreliable."

That's particularly true in animals, he said.

"They don't talk," he said. "They don't tell you what they think."

But with an objective way of looking for memory formation, it allows for a more accurate measurement of whether a particular drug or compound is helping memory formation or preventing memory loss, he said.

"It's a brain activity marker to really tell you precisely what is wrong, or what is going OK," Dr. Tsien said.

That also becomes important with other work Dr. Tsien is doing into what genes or molecules are important in memory formation. He made headlines around the world in 1999 when he revealed his "smart mouse" whose memory was enhanced by creating more NMDA receptors on brain cells.

News about it inspired a Late Show Top 10 List, which Dr. Tsien has taped to his office wall, titled "Top Ten Term Paper Topics Written By Genius Mice." (No. 9, "A Sociological Study Of Why Cats Suck.")

Dr. Tsien also found the same effect can be knocked out through genetic manipulation to create a memory loss animal model to mimic Alzheimer's disease.

"Once you have these kinds of animal models, then you can search for drugs, compounds, where you can slow that process," Dr. Tsien said.

A research institute in Shanghai is doing just that using high-through-put screening to run a number of compounds against the disease model, he said. Another couple of groups in China are working to try and enhance that NMDA function.

"Maybe we can enhance certain functions of the genes, rather than just correct the mutation," Dr. Tsien said. "That can be useful during normal aging, or early-stage mild cognitive deficits."

It is that kind of potential that made Dr. Tsien "a very important new addition to the scientific community at MCG" and in Georgia, said D. Douglas Miller, dean of the School of Medicine. It also fits with the new approach to group basic and clinical scientists together in these "discovery institutes" to help move the science into the clinic more quickly and more efficiently, an approach now backed by the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Miller said.

"His ability to use science and systems biology and high-speed computing to look at how the brain creates memory in that brain decoding project he talks about is also very cutting edge, very exciting and we think unique, quite honestly," he said.

Dr. Tsien had a second lab in the engineering department at BU and he is working on an appointment and collaboration at Georgia Tech in computing and engineering.

Part of what he has discovered is it is possible to write out memory as binary code, the same way a computer would read it.

His work could also help with the way new computers are structured to more closely mimic the brain's infinitely more complex and more powerful processing capability.

"Perception, consciousness, memory, all of these are part of the brain's function," Dr. Tsien said. "And they're interconnected. How the information, for example, landing on your retinas turns into an image in your mind and how that image turns into more abstract knowledge and later on turns that knowledge into action, it's really fascinating."

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.