Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jumal Kiele and my mission is to interview the most fascinating and important

scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

When you hear that a person officially left formal education at the age of 12,

you don't imagine that their job title will end up being Professor of Developmental

Cognitive Neuroscience. Well, Farinaevagakardim grew up in Iran under the Shah, a country she left

for the first time in the early 1960s, and from then on

fashioned her own education. As a research scientist and through studying children

with developmental amnesia, her life's quest has been to understand how we form memories of the events in our past,

from things we've experienced to places we've visited and people we've met.

All our episodes that build up our autobiographies and well make

us who we are. Farinay who's based at University College London's Institute of Child Health

and the Great Orman Street Hospital

was also part of the team that identified the Fox P2 gene, the so-called

Speech gene, through studying three generations of one family that had verbal dyspraxia.

Basically there was nothing wrong with their memories but they found speech difficult.

Farane Vaga Cardin, welcome to the life scientific.

Thank you.

It seems to me that your life scientific has been to understand something that defines the very essence of our humanity.

To use an analogy, we're all born with this empty hard drive in our heads and you want to

understand how our brain's filing system works how we lay down and retrieve memories.

...