All events, 2012

Body Representation and Self-Consciousness From Embodiment to Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Hour: 14:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Prof. Thomas Metzinger
|
Department of Philosophy University of Mainz, Germany

As a philosopher, I am interested in the relationship between body representation and the deep structure of self-consciousness. My epistemic goal in this lecture will be the simplest form of phenomenal self-consciousness: What exactly are the essential non-conceptual, pre-reflexive layers in conscious self-representation? What constitutes a minimal phenomenal self? Conceptually, I will defend the claim that agency is not part of the metaphysically necessary supervenience-basis for bodily self-consciousness. Empirically, I will draw on recent research focusing on out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and full-body illusions (FBIs). I will then proceed to sketch a new research program and advertise a new research target: "Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood", ending with an informal argument for the thesis that agency or “global control”, phenomenologically as well as functionally, is not a necessary condition for self-consciousness.

The timing of stress: relevance for its effect on rodent and human brain

Lecture
Date:
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Prof. Marian Joels
|
Dept of Neuroscience and Pharmacology University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands

Exploration of anatomy and physiology of oxytocin and vasopressin brain systems by recombinant viruses

Lecture
Date:
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Dr. Valery Grinevich
|
Dept of Molecular Neurobiology Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg

How We Know That We Know:The Process Underlying Subjective Confidence

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Prof. Asher Koriat
|
Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making University of Haifa

How do people monitor the correctness of their answers and judgments? A self-consistency model is proposed for the basis of confidence judgments and their accuracy. The model assumes that the process underlying subjective confidence in general-knowledge questions and perceptual judgments has much in common with that underlying statistical inference about the outside world. Participants behave like intuitive statisticians who attempt to reach a conclusion about a population on the basis of a small sample of observations. Subjective confidence is based on the sampling of clues from memory, and represent an assessment of the likelihood that a new sample will yield the same decision. Results consistent with the model were obtained across several two-alternative forced-choice tasks. The model explains some of the basic observations about subjective confidence and generates new predictions.

Slick. How smooth and attractive can it be, given our brain?

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Prof. Alessandro Treves
|
Cognitive Neuroscience, SISSA, Trieste, Italy

It has taken about 30 years for the notion of attractor dynamics to get the attention of the experimental neuroscience community. Now that some are beginning to investigate the more sophisticated idea of continuous attractors, where marginal stability can be used for cognitive operations such as path integration or the prediction of the consequences of one's own actions, it is time to tell the truth about continuous attractors. I will discuss a quantitative approach to the smoothness of the spatial maps that can be established in the CA3 hippocampal network, and suggest that in the space of memories, we may jump more often than slide.

Neuronal Avalanches

Lecture
Date:
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Hour: 12:00
Location:
Nella and Leon Benoziyo Building for Brain Research
Dr. Nir Friedman
|
University of Illinois

In recent years, experiments detecting the electrical firing patterns in slices of in vitro brain tissue have been analyzed to suggest the presence of scale invariance and possibly criticality in the brain. Much of the work done however has been limited in two ways: 1) the data collected is from local field potentials that do not represent the firing of individual neurons; 2) the analysis has been primarily limited to histograms. In our work we examine data based on the firing of individual neurons (spike data), and greatly extend the analysis by considering shape collapse and exponents. Our results strongly suggest that the brain operates near a tuned critical point of a highly distinctive universality class.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder-Seeking a Biological Anchor

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Prof. Arieh Shalev
|
Department of Psychiatry The Hebrew University and Hadassah School of Medicine, Jerusalem

Medical treatment enjoys revolutionary progress with the advent of molecular biology and tissue/cell- targeted therapies. Psychiatric treatment, for which there is no target tissue, lags behind. In this lecture I will present the sequence of describing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and exploring its putative biology in our laboratory, and others, to illustrate some of the difficulties of going backward from Bedside to Bench in psychiatry. Specifically, the phenotype's complexity and instability have defied, so far, any simplistic biological model. Models of higher complexity have not been clearly formulated. Psychiatric nomenclature and classification must be challenged as well.

Role of medial prefrontal cortex neuronal ensembles in context-induced relapse to heroin

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Hour: 10:00
Location:
Nella and Leon Benoziyo Building for Brain Research
Dr. Yavin Shaham
|
Behavioral Neuroscience Branch
 NIH/NIDA/IRP, Baltimore, MD, USA

Optogenetics in Primates: Progress and Opportunities for System Neuroscience and Neuroprosthetics

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Dr. Ilka Diester
|
Ernst Strungmann Institute, Max Planck, Frankfurt

Optogenetics is a versatile technology which is based on light sensitive membrane proteins. Those membrane proteins are called opsins. They are derived from microbial organisms which use them to orient themselves towards or away from light of specific wavelengths. Surprisingly, opsins can be safely integrated into the membranes of neurons by using viral vectors or transgenetic techniques, thus making the neurons light-sensitive without causing any aversive reaction. When shining light pulses of different wavelengths on the opsin-expressing neurons, we can either elicit or inhibit an action potential depending on the introduced opsin. Channelrhodopsin-2, for example, is an excitatory opsin which causes neurons to spike under the influence of blue light while Halorhodopsin silences neurons during the presence of yellow light. Although just six years have passed since the term optogenetics was coined, the technique quickly became one of the favorite toys of system neuroscientists. It is already used worldwide in flies, fish and rodents. Now, monkeys bring new requirements to the table. Monkeys are extremely valuable animals and are typically trained for months or years. Hence, the number of experiments with each animal is limited and each experiment has to be well planned and be conducted with exceptional care. The efforts are well justified. Monkeys resemble humans in their cognitive abilities and fine motor skills more than any other standard animal model. They can learn categories, rules and associations, come to decisions, and grasp and manipulate objects in a very human like manner. The neural correlates of these abilities are encoded in areas that are similar to human brain areas. These similarities make monkeys essential for the translation of knowledge, techniques and cures from simpler animal models, such as rodents, to humans. I will discuss recent progress in optogenetics in primates and give a glimpse on putative medical applications with a focus on bidirectional neuroprosthetic devices. Neuroprosthetics is a field which aims to help people who lost control over one or more of their limbs due to a spinal cord injury, a neural disease, a stroke, or an amputation. By reading out signals directly from cortex, decoding them, and using these decoded signals to control a prosthetic device we can bypass the faulty circuits. I will describe the opportunities which optogenetics provide for writing in tactile information. This could allow the users of neural prostheses to not only control a robotic arm but also to feel what they are grasping.

Embracing disorder: making sense of complex population codes

Lecture
Date:
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Hour: 13:00
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Dr. Omri Barak
|
Dept of Neuroscience, Columbia University, NY

What is the nature of neural representations? Many studies addressing this question searched for single neurons with easily interpretable activity profiles, even though all cognitive tasks require the joint activity of a large population of neurons. In this talk I highlight the "other" neurons, and show that when considered as a population these "disordered" neurons can support behavioral tasks - and are even a better substrate for flexible tasks than "ordered" neurons are. Using a combination of data analysis from the labs of Ranulfo Romo and Earl Miller with numerical simulations and analytical calculations I will try to make all of these notions and statements more rigorous and precise.

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All events, 2012

Slick. How smooth and attractive can it be, given our brain?

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Prof. Alessandro Treves
|
Cognitive Neuroscience, SISSA, Trieste, Italy

It has taken about 30 years for the notion of attractor dynamics to get the attention of the experimental neuroscience community. Now that some are beginning to investigate the more sophisticated idea of continuous attractors, where marginal stability can be used for cognitive operations such as path integration or the prediction of the consequences of one's own actions, it is time to tell the truth about continuous attractors. I will discuss a quantitative approach to the smoothness of the spatial maps that can be established in the CA3 hippocampal network, and suggest that in the space of memories, we may jump more often than slide.

Neuronal Avalanches

Lecture
Date:
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Hour: 12:00
Location:
Nella and Leon Benoziyo Building for Brain Research
Dr. Nir Friedman
|
University of Illinois

In recent years, experiments detecting the electrical firing patterns in slices of in vitro brain tissue have been analyzed to suggest the presence of scale invariance and possibly criticality in the brain. Much of the work done however has been limited in two ways: 1) the data collected is from local field potentials that do not represent the firing of individual neurons; 2) the analysis has been primarily limited to histograms. In our work we examine data based on the firing of individual neurons (spike data), and greatly extend the analysis by considering shape collapse and exponents. Our results strongly suggest that the brain operates near a tuned critical point of a highly distinctive universality class.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder-Seeking a Biological Anchor

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Prof. Arieh Shalev
|
Department of Psychiatry The Hebrew University and Hadassah School of Medicine, Jerusalem

Medical treatment enjoys revolutionary progress with the advent of molecular biology and tissue/cell- targeted therapies. Psychiatric treatment, for which there is no target tissue, lags behind. In this lecture I will present the sequence of describing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and exploring its putative biology in our laboratory, and others, to illustrate some of the difficulties of going backward from Bedside to Bench in psychiatry. Specifically, the phenotype's complexity and instability have defied, so far, any simplistic biological model. Models of higher complexity have not been clearly formulated. Psychiatric nomenclature and classification must be challenged as well.

Role of medial prefrontal cortex neuronal ensembles in context-induced relapse to heroin

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Hour: 10:00
Location:
Nella and Leon Benoziyo Building for Brain Research
Dr. Yavin Shaham
|
Behavioral Neuroscience Branch
 NIH/NIDA/IRP, Baltimore, MD, USA

Optogenetics in Primates: Progress and Opportunities for System Neuroscience and Neuroprosthetics

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Dr. Ilka Diester
|
Ernst Strungmann Institute, Max Planck, Frankfurt

Optogenetics is a versatile technology which is based on light sensitive membrane proteins. Those membrane proteins are called opsins. They are derived from microbial organisms which use them to orient themselves towards or away from light of specific wavelengths. Surprisingly, opsins can be safely integrated into the membranes of neurons by using viral vectors or transgenetic techniques, thus making the neurons light-sensitive without causing any aversive reaction. When shining light pulses of different wavelengths on the opsin-expressing neurons, we can either elicit or inhibit an action potential depending on the introduced opsin. Channelrhodopsin-2, for example, is an excitatory opsin which causes neurons to spike under the influence of blue light while Halorhodopsin silences neurons during the presence of yellow light. Although just six years have passed since the term optogenetics was coined, the technique quickly became one of the favorite toys of system neuroscientists. It is already used worldwide in flies, fish and rodents. Now, monkeys bring new requirements to the table. Monkeys are extremely valuable animals and are typically trained for months or years. Hence, the number of experiments with each animal is limited and each experiment has to be well planned and be conducted with exceptional care. The efforts are well justified. Monkeys resemble humans in their cognitive abilities and fine motor skills more than any other standard animal model. They can learn categories, rules and associations, come to decisions, and grasp and manipulate objects in a very human like manner. The neural correlates of these abilities are encoded in areas that are similar to human brain areas. These similarities make monkeys essential for the translation of knowledge, techniques and cures from simpler animal models, such as rodents, to humans. I will discuss recent progress in optogenetics in primates and give a glimpse on putative medical applications with a focus on bidirectional neuroprosthetic devices. Neuroprosthetics is a field which aims to help people who lost control over one or more of their limbs due to a spinal cord injury, a neural disease, a stroke, or an amputation. By reading out signals directly from cortex, decoding them, and using these decoded signals to control a prosthetic device we can bypass the faulty circuits. I will describe the opportunities which optogenetics provide for writing in tactile information. This could allow the users of neural prostheses to not only control a robotic arm but also to feel what they are grasping.

Embracing disorder: making sense of complex population codes

Lecture
Date:
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Hour: 13:00
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Dr. Omri Barak
|
Dept of Neuroscience, Columbia University, NY

What is the nature of neural representations? Many studies addressing this question searched for single neurons with easily interpretable activity profiles, even though all cognitive tasks require the joint activity of a large population of neurons. In this talk I highlight the "other" neurons, and show that when considered as a population these "disordered" neurons can support behavioral tasks - and are even a better substrate for flexible tasks than "ordered" neurons are. Using a combination of data analysis from the labs of Ranulfo Romo and Earl Miller with numerical simulations and analytical calculations I will try to make all of these notions and statements more rigorous and precise.

Mini-Symposium-Windows into the Mind:New Approaches to Brain and Cognition

Lecture
Date:
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Hour: 13:45 - 16:30
Location:
Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Building for Biomedical Research

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