Blog | Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Unlocking the brain’s symphony with neural manifolds

Neural manifolds have become a cornerstone of neuroscience. Initially explored in locust perception, they now offer profound insights into brain function across species. SWC Seminar speaker Dr Juan Alvaro Gallego’s team have revealed patterns transcending intraspecies boundaries, shedding light on the brain’s inner workings.

Teaching artificial networks how animals pose

In this Q&A with SWC Seminar speaker Dr Matthew Whiteway, we delve into the nuances of pose estimation, contrasting supervised and unsupervised approaches, discussing the novel aspects of the Lightning Pose algorithm, and exploring its potential impact on neuroscience research.

26 February 2024

Understanding real world learning in adolescence

Learning in the real world is a highly complex process. There are many different aspects that influence an individual’s learning, such as context, feedback and the accumulation of past experience. In a recent SWC Seminar, Linda Wilbrecht, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, outlined her ongoing efforts to unpack this complexity in mice and potentially translate it back to human learning.

22 February 2024

RatInABox: a new toolkit for modelling navigation in the brain

Modelling navigation in the brain is no easy feat. Researchers often spend months writing code to enable them to study computational questions about how the brain represents the world. But what if there was a toolkit that could simulate animals moving around an environment and model their neural activity?

13 February 2024

Black-capped chickadee in the wild with text "SWC Speaker Series"

Could food-caching birds help elucidate memory formation?

Dr. Hannah Payne, a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University, studies chickadees as they offer unprecedented access to neural circuits at precise moments of memory formation and retrieval. In her recent Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series talk at SWC, she described the discovery of spatial representations in the avian hippocampus and how her latest research is allowing her to behaviourally dissociate physical location from viewed location.

31 January 2024

Collaborating towards genetic tools to study visually-guided behaviours

Dr Jianhua ‘JC’ Cang studies how visual functions, such as our being able to perceive with our eyes, arise from different cell types. In this interview, he shares his team’s findings in the superior colliculus, shedding light on the importance of collaboration and encouraging the visual neuroscience field to embrace the study of tree shrews.

22 January 2024

Revealing the hidden precision of inhibitory circuits

In a new paper published in Neuron, Petr Znamenskiy, Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute and former postdoctoral researcher in the Mrsic-Flogel Lab, and colleagues looked at the organisation of inhibitory neurons, specifically focusing on their synaptic strength. Their research revealed unexpected precision of the synaptic strength of paravalbumin-positive (PV+) inhibitory neurons in the mouse visual cortex. This observation could help explain other experimental findings.

19 January 2024

Image of two populations of neurons in the motor cortex that relay information to the striatum with text overlaid "SWC Speaker Series"

Reaching for rewards: how spatial targets are learned

From reaching to pick up a cup of coffee to performing the latest TikTok dance move, we know the human brain is capable of refining movements into precise skills. In our first Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series (ENSS) talk of 2023/24, Dr Alice Mosberger, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, described a behavioural task she developed to dissect the sensorimotor areas that control different aspects of skilled movements. In this Q&A, she shares more.

15 January 2024

9 challenges of modelling cognitive mechanisms in rodents

How does the brain abstract knowledge from the world? Neuroscientists have been studying model organisms to explore this question and thanks to advances in genetic tools in mice and rats, the circuit level mechanisms of how the brain drives behaviour are starting to be decoded. But modelling cognitive mechanisms in rodents is difficult. We asked SWC Seminar speakers about the key challenges. Here are their nine insights.

19 December 2023

Preparing to make learned movements

Whether we’re articulating words to share with our family how the week went, getting on our bike to ride along the river, or envisioning a baseball player hit a home run, learned reproducible movements are an integral part of our lives. In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Komiyama shared his work showing how learned activity patterns in the brain’s primary motor cortex are causally related to the body generating a learned movement.

11 December 2023

Exploring individual variability in cognitive behaviour

Have you ever wondered how your brain adapts to different situations, such as driving on the left or right side of the road depending on the country you are in? Do our brains solve these context-dependent tasks in the same way or is there individual variability? Dr Marino Pagan recently gave a seminar at SWC on his work uncovering the neural sources of individual variability in cognitive behaviour. Read the Q&A.

27 November 2023

Illustration of Stephen Reicher and text from his talk

Understanding crowd behaviour: have we learned from Covid-19?

“One of the most stupid debates in psychology, is the nature-nurture debate,” Professor Stephen Reicher said as he opened the 2023 SWC Lecture. In this Q&A, he details what first sparked his interest in crowd behaviour and his experiences from the Bristol riots in 1980 through to the Covid-19 pandemic. He touches on the importance of leaders and the implications of his research for society.

22 November 2023