Neuroscientists Talk Shop

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Suzana  Herculano-Houzel (Professor, Universidad Federal de Rio) discusses  cortical scaling rules across phylogeny, the theory of human cortical  expansion in mammalian evolution, and how deceptively simple, almost  minimalist experiments have the power to shake dogma.

Duration: 36 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Janet  Best (Assistant Professor, Ohio State University) discusses her take as  a math biologist on the interplay between applied math and biology.  She and Kelly Suter (UTSA) talk about their collaboration  in which they  model the irregular firing patterns of GnRH neurons at puberty as mixed mode oscillators.

Stay tuned after the credits for some sea squirt trivia, courtesy of C. Wilson...

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Nicholas  Priebe (Assistant Professor, University of Texas Austin) discusses  subthreshold inhibition in primary visual cortices, both as a tuning  mechanism along sensory dimensions as well as a gain control mechanism  to normalize excitation.

Duration: 36 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Michael Farries (Fellow, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Mike  Smotherman (Assistant Professor, Texas A&M) discusses speech motor  control in bats and humans, and how approaches to mammalian vocalization  have been approached in the literature.

Duration: 53 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Thursday, March 11, 2010

David  Poeppel (Professor, NYU) discusses the fundamental mismatch in the  "conceptual inventory" of psycholinguists and neuroscientists in the  study of language representation.  How does one link the computational  description of language to the neurobiological constraints of the  brain?

Find his blog Talking Brains here

Duration: 50 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Friday, April 9, 2010

Jeremy Dasen (NYU School of Medicine)

Pasko Rakic (Yale School of  Medicine)

Gary Gaufo (UTSA), Raj Awatramani (Northwestern)

Goichi  Miyoshi (Fishell Lab, NYU School of Medicine)

On April 9 2010, The UTSA Neurosciences institute hosted a panel of esteemed Developmental Neurobiologists for a symposium on "Neural Patterning in the CNS...

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Brian Christie (Professor, University of Victoria BC) talks about proliferation and survival of newly born hippocampal neurons, and  exercise as a modulator of neurogenesis in hippocampal granule cells.

Duration: 32 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Brian Derrick (Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Clive Bramham (University of Bergen, Norway) discusses the BDNF and the immediate early gene ARC, and some of the  history of LTP and how it came to be known as a potential mnemonic mechanism in learning systems.

Duration: 39 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Elizabeth Quinlan (University of Maryland, College Park) discusses the relevance of critical periods to plasticity, given current trends in post-critical  period plasticity.  She outlines her ideas about plasticity being latent  and actively constrained by ongoing activity, rather than fundamental  properties of the underlying anatomy.

Please be aware that there are some discontinuities due to editing...

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Theoden (Tay) Netoff (Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota) discusses seizure from a clinical and dynamical systems perspective, and weighs in on the  debate as to whether epilepsy results from hypersynchrony or desynchrony of brain networks.

Duration: 42 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res...