How do our brains translate the signals of millions of neurons into meaningful perceptions of our environment and help guide our behavior? Attempting to answer this question is no small task, but understanding the connection between spiking neurons and our behavior will not only provide insights into the human brain but also will be the key for developing new and innovative neuroprosthetic devices.
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Because birds share our talent for nuanced vocal communication, they make excellent models for helping us understand verbal learning and memory. Dan Margoliash has been studying the neurobiology of how birds learn and remember their songs for much of his long, productive career. What he’s learned provides critical clues to understanding our own brains, from how sleep influences learning to how problems like stuttering can arise.
The events of the last several months have compelled us to realize that many different groups of people have been systematically denied full and open participation in American life. Some devastatingly alarming events—lives extinguished for no reason—have left many of us questioning our contributions to injustice and how structures we take for granted bestow privilege to some of us over others.
Among the most prominent goals of UChicago’s Neuroscience Institute is to make a major contribution to the understanding of neural circuits—how information is processed by networks of neurons. But experimentation to understand neural circuitry is costly and complicated, in several ways.
We often think of making decisions as a relatively slow process, one where we weigh carefully the benefits and risks of the potential courses before us. But, let’s face it, if that were the case, we’d never accomplish anything.
Among the areas of neuroscience in which Neuroscience Institute scientists aim to make the greatest contribution is figuring out how the brain’s neural circuits process sensory data into perceptions and behavior.
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