Blog

What happens in our brain when we sleep? In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Julia Harris discussed how inhibiting different populations of neurons in the brain during specific states of sleep led to effects that could shed light on the role of sleep in emotional processing. In this Q&A, she touches on what has already been known about the reasons why we sleep, her key findings, and what her lab will explore in future.

How can we uncover the way we learn and know things? Recent SWC seminar speaker, Professor André Fenton, has spent his career focusing on the deviations from expectations, the noise that can’t be explained. In this Q&A, he shares how this approach has led him to a new paradigm for thinking about cognition.

In a recent SWC Seminar, Prof Gilles Laurent shared his work on the neural dynamics in sleep and visual texture perception, using the Australian dragon and cuttlefish respectively as model organisms. In this Q&A, he elaborates on the routes that his lab took to researching these topics, the specific advantages of using these animals as model organisms, future plans, and more.

What happens in our brain when we seek what we crave, like an ice-cold glass of water on a hot summer’s day? In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Mark Walton shared his work connecting striatal dopamine with reward-driven action. In this Q&A, he delves deeper into the historical backdrop of his research, the controversies around striatal dopamine’s role in signalling new information, and the implications of his findings.

In this year's public SWC Lecture, Professor Emily Murphy spoke about a simple but radical idea she calls Collective Cognitive Capital: that we can and should be using brain and behavioural science to evaluate public policy decisions by how they affect the cognitive and emotional functioning of the people.

In a recent SWC seminar, Professor Michael Long delved into his work studying vocal communication in songbirds, now expanding the scope of his research to interactive vocal communication in singing mice and humans. In this Q&A, he describes the parallels between vocal communication in the songbird, singing mouse, and human, as well as his use of cortical cooling to understand the brain mechanisms.

From washing the dishes to typing in the password to log on to our devices, learned action sequences are integral parts of our lives. In a recent SWC Virtual Seminar, Dr Xin Jin shared his work exploring the neural mechanisms of action sequence order and timing. In this Q&A, he shares some of the backstory, next steps, and more.