SAM COOKE is a post-doctoral fellow at MIT whose research interests are learning and memory. These processes are critical for well-being and survival, enabling the detection of novelty, the attainment of reward, the avoidance of punishment, the acquisition of skill and providing our cherished autobiography. Disturbances resulting from ageing or disease drastically impact quality of life, making learning and memory important processes to understand. Three major questions interest him: First, how is the nervous system modified to store memory for a long time? Second, how is stored memory retrieved only in the appropriate setting? Third, how are these processes disrupted in disease? To address these questions he works on the understudied phenomenon of behavioral habituation.