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Ann Kennedy is Associate Professor at Scripps Research Institute and runs the Laboratory for Theoretical Neuroscience and Behavior.

Among other things, Ann has been studying how processes important in life, like survival, threat response, motivation, and pain, are mediated through subcortical brain areas like the hypothalamus. She also pays attention to the time course those life processes require, which has led her to consider how the expression of things like proteins help shape neural processes throughout the brain, so we can behave appropriately in those different contexts.

You'll hear us talk about how this is still a pretty open field in theoretical neuroscience, unlike the historically heavy use of theory in popular brain areas throughout the cortex, and the historically narrow focus on spikes or action potentials as the only game in town when it comes to neural computation. We discuss that and I link in the show notes to a commentary piece Ann wrote, in which she argues for both top-down and bottom-up theoretical approaches.

I also link to her papers about the early evolution of nervous systems, how heterogeneity or diversity of neurons is an advantage for neural computations, and we discuss a kaggle competition she developed to benchmark automated behavioral labels of behaving organisms, so that despite different researchers using different recording systems and setups, analyzing those data will produce consistent labels to better compare across labs and aggregated bigger and better data sets.

Read the transcript.

0:00 - Intro