Event Dates (Pacific Time):
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - 2:00 PM to Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - 2:30 PMVenue Space:
UCSD – CNCB Large Conference Room and NSB Auditorium
Rethinking gating: selective integration of sensory signals through network dynamics
Stanford University
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
2:00 pm
CNCB Large Conference Room, UC San Diego
A hallmark of decision-making in primates is contextual sensitivity: a given stimulus can lead to different decisions depending on the context in which it is presented. This kind of flexible decision-making depends critically upon gating and integration of context-appropriate information sources within the brain. We have analyzed neural mechanisms underlying gating and integration in animals trained to perform a context-sensitive decision task. Surprisingly, both relevant and irrelevant sensory signals are present within frontal lobe circuits that form decisions, implying that gating occurs very late in the process. Dynamical systems analysis of the neural data, combined with a dynamical recurrent network model, suggests a novel mechanism in which gating and integration are dual aspects of a single dynamical process.
Neuroscience, explanation, and the problem of free will
Stanford University
03/14/2012
12:00 PM
NSB Auditorium, UC San Diego
The ‘central dogma’ of neuroscience is that all our behavior and mental life—including our sense of a conscious, continuing self—is inextricably linked to the biology of the brain. Neuroscience ‘explanations’, therefore, tend to account for mental phenomena such as thought, emotion, belief and choice in terms of the basic elements of cellular communication within the brain—action potentials, synapses and neuromodulation. Such mechanistic accounts, which appear increasingly powerful, have been cited as evidence that ‘folk psychological’ explanations of behavior—including beliefs, values, freedom and responsibility—will be replaced ultimately by deeper and more accurate neuroscientific explanations. In contrast, I argue that the deepest and most accurate accounts of behavior necessarily involve multiple levels of explanation. Within neuroscience itself, the best explanations are inherently multilevel, appealing simultaneously to behavioral, circuit-level, cellular and genetic insights. Outside the domain of neuroscience proper, human behavior depends additionally on multiple levels of social and cultural organization. Each level of explanation complements and corrects, but does not replace, the others. More than ever in our world, beliefs, values and choices matter.
