Neuroscientists Talk Shop

Thursday, January 31, 2013

William Armstrong (University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center) talks about developing the intracellular biocytin labeling technique.  This is a follow up to our 2008 talk with Bill (episode 15), when he told us about functional studies of neurosecretary cells of the supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei of the hypothalamus.

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, November 15, 2012

Simon Giszter (Drexel School of Medicine) discusses spinal cord modularity based on the idea of motor primitives as optimization learning constraints that can be flexibly modulated by cortical inputs.  He discusses ideas about the origins of motor primitives (are they built by evolution at the level of the species or online at the level of the task for individuals), and describes possible neural mechanisms for how spinal primitives may be orchestrated.

Duration: 34 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 27, 2012

Mark Laubach (Yale School of Medicine) discusses mouse frontal cortex as a model for human frontal cortical function.  He talks about the anterior cingulate cortex as an area in the context of performance monitoring and adaptive control.

Duration: 29 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, September 20, 2012

Barry Connors (Brown University) talks about the historical timeline of research on electrical synapses.  He discusses his experimental  exploration of synchrony in cortical interneurons and considers theoretical models of weakly coupled oscillators.

Duration: 46 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Joseph Beatty (Postdoctoral Fellow, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Anastassios Tzingounis (University of CT) discusses the mysterious slow after-hyperpolarization current, and talks about a candidate component mechanism he has described that involves the calcium sensor hippocalcin.  He also discusses how he is using atomic force microscopy to map changing distributions of ion channels on living cells.

Duration: 39 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Carlos Paladini (Assoc Prof, UTSA)

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.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Erich Jarvis (Duke University/HHMI) discusses evolutionary origins of the  vocal motor learning pathway in songbirds, his new work on vocal communication in a new mammalian species, and his spearheading of the Avian Brain Nomenclature forum as a consensus building effort that shaped a decade of avian brain research.

Duration: 55 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Carlos Paladini (Assoc Prof, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA)

Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Nicole Wicha (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Bharath Chandrasekaran (UT Austin) discusses the corticocentric view of cognitive brain research, and how he has optimized of functional imaging techniques for study of auditory and speech processing, and the influence of music training on the development of auditory skills.

Duration: 39 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, April 5, 2012

Gordon  Fishell (NYU School of Medicine) discusses developmental interneuron diversity, the debate between the "lumpers" and "splitters", and the possibility of tracing psychiatric disorders to focal genetic origins.  The group assesses approaches for relating molecular genetics to circuits and ultimately behavior.

Duration: 55 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Gary Gaufo (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Carlos Paladini (Assoc Prof, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Johannes Schul (Associate Professor, University of Missouri) discusses the the katydid communication system and its unique strategy for sound segregation of behaviorally relevant information, in a discussion hosted by Rama Ratnam.

Duration: 39 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA)

Rama Ratnam (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

The UTSA Neurosciences institute hosted an all-star panel of computational neuroscientists for a symposium on "Neural Dynamics & Coding."  This discussion, recorded after the day's talks, has Todd Troyer leading the group in covering a wide range of topics, including how to talk about coding as you move toward behavior, the distinction between coding and computation, and how much of neural computation is centralized vs. offloaded to peripheral systems.

Participants:

Uri Eden (Boston University)

Adrienne Fairhall (UW, Seattle)

Eugene Izhikevich (BrainCorp)

Eric Shea-Brown (UW, Seattle)

Todd Troyer (UTSA)

Charles Wilson (UTSA)

Michael Farries (UTSA)

Fidel Santamaria (UTSA)

Duration: 42 minutes

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.