Neuroscientists Talk Shop

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Leigh  Leasure (University of Houston) talks about the dueling effects of  exercise and binge alcohol consumption on cell health and proliferation  in the dentate gyrus.  The idea that excercise may protect against  binge-induced cell loss is discussed.

Duration: 41 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Brian Derrick (Prof, UTSA)

Carlos Paladini (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Jonathan Pillow (Assistant Professor, UT Austin) talks about using assumption-free statistics to to extract structure from high dimensional data.  The group discusses levels of analysis in computational  modeling, and considers the merits of using functional behavior of neurons ("the what") in the absence of mechanism ("the how") as the starting point when modeling complex neural systems...

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Charlie Wilson hosts Joshua Berke (Associate Professor, University of Michigan  at Ann Arbor) in a discussion about action representations in the striatum.  The problematic nature of the term "representation" is  discussed, and analogies to the literature on spatial representations in  the hippocampus are considered...

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Thomas Cleland (Cornell University) discusses the idea of olfactory receptive fields, and the problems associated with compressing the high-dimensional parameters of odor space into two-dimensional brain space.  Analogies to the retina are considered.

Duration: 41 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Carlos Paladini (Assoc Prof, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Rama Ratnam hosts William Brownell (The Jake and Nina Kamin Chair of Otolaryngology and  Head and Neck Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine) as he discusses electromechanical signal processing in the cochlea.  Electromotility in  the nervous system is discussed, specifically in the context of cochlear amplification...

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Dieter Jaeger (Professor, Emory University) talks about the complexity of modeling systems whose biological function is ill-defined, and how to determine how complex a model needs to be.  The possibility of building structured queryable databases for mining neuroscience data is  discussed, as are thoughts on mouse model systems as an approximation of  the human brain...

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Anne Young (Julianne Dorn Professor of Neurology, Harvard MGH) talks about her early studies of basal ganglia functional anatomy, and how they led  to her famed dual pathway model of the basal ganglia.  The group muses on the model's strengths and shortcomings over the decades, and discusses how it organized thinking in the field of basal ganglia research and continues to be relevant to clinicians and researchers today...

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Kara Federmeier (Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) talks about prediction in language production and comprehension, and how ERPs are used to reveal differences in the time course and components of language processing.  Also discussed are the N400 as a measure of meaning, and general principles of language lateralization...

Thursday, September 1, 2011

David McCormick (Dorys McConnel Duberg Professor of Neurobiology, Yale School of Medicine) talks about flexibility of information coding in neural systems, and the complexity of undertaking studies of functional connectivity in cortical networks.

Duration: 40 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Joseph Beatty (Post-doc, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res...

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Thomas Blanpied (Assistant Professor, University of Maryland School of  Medicine) talks about molecular organization at the post-synaptic density, models of receptor mobility, and visualization of living synapses in real time.

Duration: 45 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res...