Tom Daniel: 2011 Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium скачать в хорошем качестве

Tom Daniel: 2011 Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium

Tom Daniel, University of Washington "Sensorimotor control of movement: Even the circuits of little brains accomplish complex tasks" How does information come into our brains and create behavior? Dr. Daniel opened with the supposition that most neuroscientists are asking the same question, "How is information encoded and decoded to control behavior?" To answer his piece of the puzzle, Dr. Daniel is looking at insects whose nervous systems are far smaller than those of a mouse or other mammals. The moth, for example, must make decisions in flight, e.g., to turn left or right, to go under or over a branch. How is the moth's brain set up to make these decisions? How are multiple sensory modalities, e.g., visual, olfactory, and mechanosensory inputs, used to make these decisions? Perhaps more provocative, what would it take to build a device capable of this type of autonomy? In the search for understanding both the encoding and decoding of information with multiple sensory inputs, Dr. Daniel advocates the widespread deployment of affordable virtual reality systems to better understand how information is processed. These devices allow scientists to study behavior, as in a moth's flying behavior, in a controlled environment. He pulled a tiny $300 virtual reality system out of his pocket stating, "This one is mine; they're on backorder." At the other end of analysis, to understand decoding, he advocates technology for stimulation and recording in freely-behaving animals. The problem is getting it down to the small scale and keeping it affordable. With the spread of radio frequency technology (RFID), opportunities to develop smaller chips and take them wireless and batteryless are becoming feasible. Eventually, Dr. Daniel affirms, we will be able to control a moth's flight decisions in real time and understand behavior well enough to build devices that have the same level of autonomy.