Events

Spontaneous activity accounts for most of what the brain does and is likely to be key for information processing in the brain, but its function is still quite mysterious. Two key spontaneous activity processes are the Default Mode Network (DMN), a set of areas that are most markedly connected and active during behavioural idleness, and […]

This event will be held virtually: Zoom link

Diseases of the brain are among the most challenging disorders to diagnose and treat. Unlike cancer, where human tissue biopsy specimens are routinely collected, brain disorders lack routine access to specimens that are essential to make progress in understanding pathophysiology and developing effective treatments. Currently, most brain diseases are studied in living patients using neuroimaging […]

The cerebellum has evolved to support basic sensory-motor functions. In the human brain, the cerebellar circuitry has dramatically expanded and contributes to virtually every cognitive function, including working memory, language, and social cognition. Given its uniform cytoarchitecture, it has long been hypothesized that the cerebellar circuit performs a common computation across all these functional domains. […]

Approach-avoidance (AA) conflict resolution is a form of decision making that is fundamentally important for survival and requires the effective evaluation of affective stimuli or events with mixed outcomes (positive and negative). Despite the prevailing view of hippocampal involvement in learning and memory processes, the hippocampus is also thought to be involved in the resolution […]

To make adaptive decisions we must cast ourselves into the future and consider the outcomes of our potential choices. This prospective consideration is informed by our memories. I will discuss our lab’s recent work investigating the neural circuits responsible for encoding, updating, and retrieving reward memories for use in the considerations underlying decision making. We […]

Speaking is a unique and defining human behavior.  Over the past decade, we have focused on deciphering the basic neural code that underlies our ability to speak fluently. During speech production, vocal tract movement gestures for all speech sounds are encoded by highly specialized neural activity, organized as a map, in the human speech motor […]

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is the most common type of traumatic brain injury globally. Although its consequences may be short term, mTBI often leads to long-term neuropsychiatric and neurological impairments and has been estimated to increase the probability of later life dementia up to six-fold. It is presently not clear what neuropathological changes underlie […]

In 1973 John Heuser and Tom Reese demonstrated that neurotransmitter was released from neurons via the fusion of neurotransmitter-filled vesicles with the cell membrane.  But at the same time, these experiments launched a controversy that is unresolved today – do vesicles collapse into the membrane and are then recycled slowly on the order of 20 […]

Dopamine is a neuromodulator that codes information on various time scales. I will discuss recent progress on the identification of fast release mechanisms for dopamine in the mouse striatum. I will present data on triggering mechanisms of dopamine release and evaluate its roles in striatal regulation. In the long-term, our work will allow for a better understanding of the mechanisms and […]

Mammals use a sophisticated, multi-regional memory system to guide behavior. A major goal of neuroscience is to understand the mechanisms—ranging from molecular to cellular to systems—that make this possible. Spruston will describe recent results from his lab using mouse behavior, patch-clamp recording, imaging, and RNA-seq, which collectively seek to elucidate how a diverse and complex […]

The Heller Lab research program is focused on discovering molecular mechanisms by which epigenetic reprogramming contributes to neuropsychiatric disease. To this end, Dr. Heller pioneered the use of targeted epigenetic editing in brain, to elucidate the precise causal role of histone posttranslational modifications on gene expression and alternative splicing in specific neuronal subpopulations. Dr. Heller […]