The walls of Arthur Wingfield's office, a balance of brain paraphernalia and pictures of his family and friends, are a testament to the professor's multifaceted personality.Before I even have the chance to begin asking Wingfield about his work, he slips his business card, Houdini-like, into my palm. With an illuminating smile, Wingfield says, "The first thing you do before asking any questions is to have a firm idea of who you're talking to."

Last November, Prof. Wingfield (PSYC) published the results of an enlightening twin study that demonstrated the significance of genetic inheritance in hearing loss that occurs during late middle age.

The results of Wingfield's experiment suggest that differences in hearing acuity of late middle-aged people can be attributed to genetic factors.

This research confirms the importance of genetic factors in age-associated hearing loss and the need for vulnerable individuals and their families to take extra care to prevent further hearing damage, Wingfield said in an article published November 14th in Bio-Medicine, an online science magazine.

Wingfield also said in the article that this research implies that middle-aged and older people with a genetic predisposition to hearing loss should avoid environmental risk factors, such as harmful noise and medications with side effects that could potentially damage hearing.

Wingfield collaborated with psychiatric researchers across the United States to examine hearing loss in monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins. The results of the study-conducted as part of the Viet Nam Era Twin Study of Aging-were published in the Journal of Gerentology, in an article titled "A Twin Study of Genetic Contributions to Hearing Acuity in Late Middle Age."

Wingfield is the director of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems, funded by the National Institute of Aging. Although he is on sabbatical this semester while working at the Center for Functional Neuroimaging at the University of Pennsylvania, the endearingly eccentric scientist also runs the Memory and Cognition Lab at Brandeis, where neuroscientists are currently running two separate studies on prosody (the study of nonverbal cues to language such as voice intonation and the melody of speech that helps humans comprehend language easier) in the right hemisphere of stroke patients and pupil dilation during attentive listening.

Wingfield elaborated on his passion for the study of the human brain. "I simply love human neurophysiology," he said. "That is the structure of the human brain for higher leaning processes such as language and memory. The circuitry of the brain is fascinating with its depth and emphasis for its recollective abilities."

A man with a vivid past full of twist and turns, Wingfield began narrating his journey to his present work in neuroscience like a familiar fairy tale.

The scientist actually began as an engineering major. "When you dont have any starting ideas for what you wanted to do," he explained, "the typical thing to do was major in engineering."

Wingfield received his undergraduate degree in engineering from the University of Connecticut, but, fascinated by how the brain functioned, his interest was soon captured by psychology.

Wingfield went on to complete his Ph.D. in psychology at Oxford University and completed his graduate work on "how language is organized within the brain."

"Brandeis recruited me away from England," he says. Wingfield declined to mention the year he began teaching at Brandeis, as he "[did] not want people to know how old [he is]."

Fueled by his teaching motivation and interest in his research, Wingfield has been a valuable addition to the Brandeis faculty. Until this semester, he has taught "Human Neuropsychology," a semester-long course offered each year that focuses on the physiology of the brain relating to neurological behavior.

Wingfield conducted his work on age-related hearing loss at the Volen National Center for Complex Systems and Department of Psychology at Brandeis.

The study involved 179 and 150 fraternal male twin pairs from the Vietnam Era Twin Registry, ranging in age from 52 to 60 years, according to the article in Bio-Medicine. Auditory testing was proctored under hearing parameters ranging from 500 herz to 8,000 herz, a difference that can be compared to that of a fifth-octave piano note versus the high pitch threshold for human speech.

Wingfield had the veterans re-tested every few years, because it was "necessary to plot the rate of change in accordance to understanding risk factors such as ototoxicity and acoustic trauma."

The data from Wingfield's study accounts for variance in two-thirds of the subjects' dominant ears, and for half the variance observed in the subjects' weaker ears.

"Our goal," Wingfield explained, "is to be able to look at hearing loss based on these ratio changes of heritability."

Certain genes are surmised to play a significant role in hearing loss, and this information can be helpful in identifying individuals at risk for hearing loss. Two vulnerable groups for future study involve those prone to suffering from noise exposure or audio-disruptive medication.

Inside the Memory and Cognition Lab on the third floor of Volen, neuroscientists are conducting other studies in neuroscience.

According to Wingfield, a "handful of neuroscientists," including 12 graduate students, a few senior honors students and a couple of paid research positions, currently run the lab in his absence. The department is currently studying speech comprehension, focusing on examining changes in older individuals.

"Major areas of our research revolve around aspects of language, such as speech compression and prosody," says Tepring Piquado, a graduate student who works in the lab.

Piquado, a third-year neuroscience student working on her thesis, described two particular experiments involving sentence syntax.

The first study involves prosody in the right hemisphere of stroke patients in varying age groups. ""Subjects hear sentence fragments, then are asked to complete the sentence so that it makes grammatical sense to them," Piquado said. "Their response to sentences without timing or without pitch signal, which cue they are relying on to understand syntax."

The second experiment "re-investigated an old study, which reveals pupil dilation during attentive listening," Piquado said. Our pupils dilate when attempting to memorize characters such as letters and digits and contract during recitation from memory. Complexity and pupil dilation seem to be linked and are thus measured in the lab through complex sentences of subject-relative and object-relative clauses.

Wingfield remains eager and optimistic about the future of his scientific research.

"There are always two things I was passionate about: teaching and research," he says. "These two support one another, and as long as I can do both, I am cooping up at Brandeis until the grants are exhausted.