Neuroscientists Talk Shop

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. Duration: 43 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Nicole Wicha (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

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. Duration: 41 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Carlos Paladini (Assoc Prof, UTSA) George Perry (Dean, College of Science UTSA) Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA, UTHSCSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

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. Duration: 41 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA) Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA, UTHSCSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

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. Duration: 47 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Rama Ratnam (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

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. Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

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. Duration: 43 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Michael Farries (Fellow, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

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. Duration: 39 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

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. Asst Prof, UTSA) Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA, UTHSCSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, December 2, 2010 Bill Spain (Professor, University of Washington) talks about spike frequency adaptation in the avian auditory system and cortex, and considers the utility of adaptation for integrators vs coincidence detectors across various timescales.  In addition Bill talks about dividing his time as a  clinician, and how his clinical vantage point impacts his take on basic science research. Duration: 41 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Rama Ratnam (Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, October 14, 2010 Peter Narins (Professor, UCLA) talks about being a member of the founding generation of neuroethologists in the 1970s, and of his pivotal work describing both ultrasonic and subsonic communication in two very different species. Duration: 44 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Rama Ratnam (Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, October 7, 2010 Ranier Gutierrez (Assistant Professor, CINVESTAV, Mexico) talks about oscillations in the distributed network that regulates feeding  behaviors, its entrainment by licking, and the significance of his finding that the responses of nucleus accumbens signal meal-related activity. Duration: 37 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, September 30, 2010 Paul E. Gold (Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) discusses the idea of studying memory loss to study the process of memory formation and his studies of forgetting in aging populations. Duration: 37 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Brian Derrick (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, September 23, 2010 Theoden (Tay) Netoff (Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota) discusses seizure from a clinical and dynamical systems perspective, and weighs in on the  debate as to whether epilepsy results from hypersynchrony or desynchrony of brain networks. Duration: 42 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, September 9, 2010 Elizabeth Quinlan (University of Maryland, College Park) discusses the relevance of critical periods to plasticity, given current trends in post-critical  period plasticity.  She outlines her ideas about plasticity being latent  and actively constrained by ongoing activity, rather than fundamental  properties of the underlying anatomy. Please be aware that there are some discontinuities due to editing. Duration: 41 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, April 22, 2010 Clive Bramham (University of Bergen, Norway) discusses the BDNF and the immediate early gene ARC, and some of the  history of LTP and how it came to be known as a potential mnemonic mechanism in learning systems. Duration: 39 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Brian Derrick (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, April 15, 2010 Brian Christie (Professor, University of Victoria BC) talks about proliferation and survival of newly born hippocampal neurons, and  exercise as a modulator of neurogenesis in hippocampal granule cells. Duration: 32 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Brian Derrick (Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Friday, April 9, 2010 Jeremy Dasen (NYU School of Medicine) Pasko Rakic (Yale School of  Medicine) Gary Gaufo (UTSA), Raj Awatramani (Northwestern) Goichi  Miyoshi (Fishell Lab, NYU School of Medicine) On April 9 2010, The UTSA Neurosciences institute hosted a panel of esteemed Developmental Neurobiologists for a symposium on "Neural Patterning in the CNS."   In this discussion, recorded after the day's talks, Salma Quraishi  hosts the group in discussing a wide range of topics, including whether  genetic lineage can be used to define functional cell groups,  cortical  protomaps in target-driven development, and the integrative future of  developmental neuroscience. Duration: 30 minutes acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, March 11, 2010 David  Poeppel (Professor, NYU) discusses the fundamental mismatch in the  "conceptual inventory" of psycholinguists and neuroscientists in the  study of language representation.  How does one link the computational  description of language to the neurobiological constraints of the  brain? Find his blog Talking Brains here Duration: 50 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Nicole Wicha (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, February 11, 2010 Mike  Smotherman (Assistant Professor, Texas A&M) discusses speech motor  control in bats and humans, and how approaches to mammalian vocalization  have been approached in the literature. Duration: 53 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Nicole Wicha (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, February 4, 2010 Nicholas  Priebe (Assistant Professor, University of Texas Austin) discusses  subthreshold inhibition in primary visual cortices, both as a tuning  mechanism along sensory dimensions as well as a gain control mechanism  to normalize excitation. Duration: 36 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Michael Farries (Fellow, UTSA) Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.