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One of the greatest feats (and mysteries) of the human visual system is how we perceive a visually stable world despite constantly moving our eyes to take in the entire scene in front of us. But maybe our representation of the visual world isn't as stable as we think.
Read MoreToday, our guest is Virginia Lee, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Co-Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at UPENN's School of Medicine. We’ll be speaking with her about identifying some of the most famous in neurodegenerative disease, and even all of neuroscience, figuring what to do with your life, and collaborating with a life-partner.
Today, our guest is Elly Nedivi, Professor of Neurobiology at MIT. In this episode, we talk about structural plasticity of inhibition, screening for plasticity genes, and running buddies at Stanford.
Today, our guest is Rui Costa,an HHMI investigator at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Portugal. Well be speaking with him about using transgenics to study complex disease, the neural mechanisms underlying habit learning (like piano playing), and keeping cows as pets.
Catch up on Neurotalk by checking out our Season 3 Archive here.
Season 3 features include The Highlight Reel with the best clips from all seasons of Neurotalk, a special episode on The Future of Scholarly Publishing, our two most popular interviews to date (with Michael Shadlen and James Surmeier), and much more!
We’ve all seen it in action. Tell a puppy dog to sit, and if he obeys, he gets a treat. Rinse and repeat this reinforcement training, and you soon have an obedient puppy dog that sits on command. How does this reinforcement work? And why does it need to occur so soon after the desired behavior?
Read MoreHow do brains generate randomness? We’ll talk about what randomness means in the brain - does it mean generating random numbers, much like a computer, or something more? We will then talk about why, when and finally, how the brain generates randomness.
Read MoreToday, our guest is Prof. Lorenz Studer, Professor of Developmental Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City. In this episode, we will talk about transplantation therapies specifically for Parkinson’s and growing your very own dopaminergic neurons.
"New in Neuroscience" is a new feature highlighting recent neuroscience findings. In this edition, Malcolm Campbell discusses a recent research article about how the brain pays attention to some things, while ignoring others.
The ability to selectively attend to relevant stimuli and ignore distractions is essential to animal survival. This ability is especially interesting to neuroscientists since it involves the interaction of executive control--the “mind” of the animal--with early sensory processing. It is widely believed that executive control originates in the cortex, whereas sensory signals originate in the periphery and travel to the cortex through subcortical structures such as the brain stem and the thalamus.
Read MoreWe all have an anecdote or two about real-life sensations—the smell of cooking food, the noise of thunderstorms, or the pressure of a full bladder—that made appearances in our dreams. It’s not that rare for external stimuli, when they happen to occur during dream-producing REM sleep, to be incorporated into dream content. Becca Krock discusses one such case, involving dreams, drums, and an impatient cat.
Read MoreHome of NeuWrite West and the Stanford Neuroblog.
Do you have burning questions about how the brain works? You’ve come to the right place! Submit all your questions to NeuWrite West and we will have a neuroscientist research and answer your question.
Note: The NeuWrite West team consists of research scientists. Therefore, we can not provide answers to questions of a medical nature; we are not medical doctors.
Questions will have a turn-around time of approximately one month.
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