When Richard Morris was a physics student he volunteered to be a subject in a psychology experiment. It triggered a fascination with the brain that led to him become one of the world's leading neuroscientists.

His lifetime work has focused on memory and why, in his own words, it's such an interesting thing. Consider what life would be like if we didn't have memory. Who would we be, how would we know our place in the world? In 2016 for his work looking at how we form memory and specifically the intricate cellular functions created during the memory making process, Professor Richard Morris was awarded The Brain Prize.

It was walking past fish tanks in the back of a marine biology laboratory that originally gave him the idea for an experiment that would change the way we understand how memory is formed. An idea he himself describes as being ludicrously simple. The Water Maze became and still is a standard experiment used in labs around the world to analyse memory.

This early work focused on how we form memory, today his fascination lies in what happens when our memory starts to fail.

In this episode of Brainwaves, Pennie Latin explores our memory with Professor Richard Morris and why he thinks it's one of the grand challenges of neuroscience. Show less