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Oct 9, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Olivia Gieger |Nancy Padilla-Coreano |Kevin G. Bender |Brendan Borrell
Former news reporting internThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Craft and careers, Academia, Art in science, Arts, Computational neuroscience, Modeling, Science and society Kanaka Rajan says it took her twice as long as it should have to complete her Ph.D. in computational neuroscience—because she had to decipher “inscrutable physics papers. It turns out, they weren’t that hard.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Nancy Padilla-Coreano |Olivia Gieger |Kevin G. Bender |Angie Voyles Askham
In the early 20th century, neuroscience, like many other sciences, was mostly a solitary profession. Numerous seminal papers had single authors—or two at most. Clearly, things have changed. As a young principal investigator, I have come to appreciate that scientific skills practiced alone are no longer sufficient for my students to succeed.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Olivia Gieger |Victor Llorente |Kevin G. Bender |Angie Voyles Askham
Former news reporting internThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Craft and careers, Academia, Arts, Science and society This June, hordes of filmmakers flocked to Sheffield, England, for the country’s largest documentary film festival, Sheffield DocFest. Among them was Pei Yuan Zhang, who had just received her Ph.D. in cognitive science at New York University and was the only amateur to present.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Angie Voyles Askham |Paul Middlebrooks |Jill Adams |Kevin G. Bender
Senior reporterThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Dopamine, Computational neuroscience, Decision-making, Electrophysiology, Learning, Modeling, neural coding, Reward system, Striatum, Systems neuroscience Nathaniel Daw has never touched a mouse. As professor of computational and theoretical neuroscience at Princeton University, he mainly works with other people’s data to construct models of the brain’s decision-making process.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Naoshige Uchida |Angie Voyles Askham |Kevin G. Bender |Paul Middlebrooks
How do animals learn from experiences? An influential idea is that animals constantly make predictions and compare them with what actually happens. When their predictions fail to align with reality, they adjust them. When there is no discrepancy, there is no need for learning. In other words, it is the surprise, or “prediction error,” that drives learning. In the brain, dopamine is thought to provide a type of surprise signal.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Paul Middlebrooks |Brady Huggett |Jill Adams |Kevin G. Bender
Special faculty research associate, Carnegie Mellon University;Contributor, The Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Brain Inspired, Artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, careers, Machine learning, Methods The Transmitter has partnered with “Brain Inspired,” a podcast hosted by Paul Middlebrooks that features in-depth conversations with neuroscientists studying natural and artificial intelligence, philosophy, consciousness and other related areas.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Paul Middlebrooks |Jill Adams |Kevin G. Bender |Samuel J. Gershman
Paul Middlebrooks is special faculty research associate at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies how motor cortex and basal ganglia neural population activity underlies naturalistic behaviors in freely behaving mice. He is also creator of the podcast “Brain Inspired,” and its host since 2018. Middlebrooks received his Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh in the lab of Marc Sommer.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Kevin G. Bender |Angie Voyles Askham |Olivier Winter |Jill Adams
I am a compulsive collaborator. I love seeing how people with different backgrounds think about neuroscience. More than 90 percent of what our lab has published has involved some form of collaboration, whether it be with another group at our institution or colleagues from far-flung locations. Good collaborations are force multipliers. They extend a study’s scope, enable you to ask research questions in creative ways, and add rigor by testing hypotheses from multiple angles.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Jill Adams |Rachel Zamzow |Kevin G. Bender |Samuel J. Gershman
In autistic youth with co-occurring intellectual disability, higher anxiety levels are linked to repetitive behaviors, self-injury and unusual interests. Autism ResearchPeople with neurodevelopmental conditions related to variants of the gene PPP2R5D tend to have impaired cognition, motor skills and adaptive functioning.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Kevin G. Bender |Jill Adams |Samuel J. Gershman |Calli McMurray
Professor of neurology University of California, San Francisco Kevin Bender is professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. His lab focuses on understanding how the brain encodes information at the synaptic, cellular and network level. Work primarily revolves around understanding how ion channels and modulation of ion channels contribute to these processes in health and in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions.
