Project Summary / Abstract This project is a collaboration between researchers at four universities to examine how the brain makes decisions. When a human or any animal moves through the world, it must make constant decisions about what to do next. These decisions are based on the state of the animal, its past history, and its future goals.
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Social interactions, a ubiquitous aspect of our everyday life, are critical to the health and survival of the species, but little is known about their underlying neural computations. The major limitation preventing our understanding of the neural underpinnings of social cognition is the lack of a suitable framework to allow us to study how it emerges in real time from interactions among brain networks.
Project Summary Despite the enormous complexity of the brain, it is becoming increasingly apparent that structures like the cerebral cortex are modular, relying on a set of canonical computations that occur across brain regions and modalities to mediate perception, cognition and behavior. One important example of a canonical computation is&
Project Summary Dopamine neurons (DNs) are key regulators of motivated behaviors, and defects in dopamine signaling may underlie some psychiatric disorders including addiction, depression, and schizophrenia, as well as neurological disorders such as Parkinson's. Much of the work in this area has been based on the dogma that DNs encode reward prediction errors (RPE) and that they do so in a uniform manner. However, work from several groups, including ours, indicates that DNs projecting to different targets exhibit distinct properties and serve distinct functions.
We plan to provide software support services for Neuropixels probes, a groundbreaking new tool for recording electrical signals from the brain. These probes—which were created by IMEC, a world-renowned nanoelectronics research center, in collaboration with four funding agencies (HHMI, Allen Institute, Gatsby Foundation, and Wellcome Trust)—will become publicly available in July 2018. Each device consists of a single hair-like shank containing nearly 1000 recording sites, each of which can measure voltage changes with sub-millisecond precision.
The goal of this proposal is to disseminate high resolution large volume serial section electron microscopy data to neuroscientists. Using our electron microscopy facility, we will provide user training on the use of these new technologies and provide access to our specialized facilities so that they may generate permanent ultrathin sections and create data sets amenable for neural circuit analysis or neural and glial cell type analysis.
The central nervous system (CNS) changes throughout life, and its interactions with the world produce activity- dependent plasticity that enables it to acquire and maintain useful behaviors. Recent scientific and technical advances support the development of systems that create novel interactions with the CNS that can induce and guide beneficial plasticity.
Two-photon laser scanning microscopy powers many projects in the.
Recombinant Immunolabels for Nanoprecise Brain Mapping Across Scales Understanding brain function and dysfunction requires an understanding of the circuitry of the brain from molecules to cells to circuits. While no single technique can achieve this, a strategic combination of techniques applied across scales can provide information that when integrated can lead to a more complete picture.
Understanding the function of the nervous system requires a sophisticated understanding of its main output, behavior. Although our ability to record from and to manipulate neurons and neural circuits has accelerated at a spectacular pace over the last decade, progress has lagged in coupling the interrogation of the nervous system to similarly high-resolution measures of behavior.
