Blog | Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Primed to fire: the hair-trigger neurons that drive escape

New research from Professor Tiago Branco’s lab shows that neurons in the mouse brain’s escape command centre, the dorsal periaqueductal grey (dPAG), are exquisitely poised to respond to a tiny amount of input. And when enough cells in the dPAG fire, an escape is triggered.

SWC colonnade

Asking hard questions: The SWC/Gatsby Unit annual symposium

A decade ago, the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre opened its doors with a bold ambition: to understand how the brain generates behaviour. In partnership with the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, the SWC shares a vision to understand the mechanisms of intelligent behaviour in brains and machines. At this year's joint annual symposium, researchers from both centres came together to present their work and celebrate progress towards that goal.

Two signals, one decision: cracking the brain's value code

Dr Christine Constantinople recently presented her work at SWC, and in this Q&A, she discusses her latest findings. Her work aims to reconcile dopamine's role in learning and moving, and how complex signals in the frontal cortex are read out by downstream circuits.

Image showing a dPAG neuron (gold) and surrounding input axonal fibres (cyan), reconstructed from original microscopy data

It's not the wiring that matters. It's the rhythm.

New research in mice uncovers how the brain weighs up multiple streams of information and makes the decision to escape.

Mice wiggle the wheel

New research shows that mice use active sensing to improve performance in a visual perception task.

'SWC Speaker Series'

Using Pac-Man to reveal how we make decisions

Pac-Man, released in 1980, is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential video games of all time. But what can this retro arcade game tell us about the architecture of the human brain? By studying both humans and macaques playing Pac-Man, Dr Tianming Yang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed that both species ‘speak’ a language of problem-solving. In this Q&A he discusses his work.

Targeting cortical circuit dysfunction to restore movement in Huntington's disease mice

Dr Sonja Blumenstock investigates cortical dysfunctions in Huntington’s disease mice, focusing on how different neuron subtypes are affected as the disease progresses, and how this shapes the animal’s movements. Targeted activation of specific inhibitory neurons rescued movement deficits in mice, pointing to a potential therapeutic target in Huntington's disease. As a winner of the Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series, she recently spoke at SWC about her work.

Graphic illustration depicting perception

AI, embodiment and neuroscience

We asked leading neuroscientists for their thoughts on the current rise of AI and what AI might be missing when it comes to embodiment.

Lights, neurons, action: Reconstructing movies from mouse brain activity

Imagine a world where we could visualise dreams and imagination. It might sound like something from a sci-fi story, but researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre have taken us a step closer to this futuristic reality.

Two engines of learning: how the brain builds a model of the world

A new review from Dr Athena Akrami, Group Leader at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, explores the differences and similarities between reinforcement learning and statistical learning, and future directions for research.

Solving new problems

Dr Saurabh Vyas, based at Carnegie Mellon University, is developing sophisticated behavioural tasks that enable the interpretation of neural activity during unique, one-off cognitive events, when a subject sees, does, or figures out something for the very first time. As a winner of the Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series 2025, Dr Vyas recently spoke at SWC. In this Q&A, he introduces his work and shares his excitement about the new capabilities of neuroscience.

25 February 2026

geometric shapes

The language of geometry

Human cognitive abilities differ from those of other species, but finding clear, observable markers of the gap remains challenging. One domain where this difference becomes visible is our capacity to recognise 2D shapes. While many animals can recognise flat depictions of objects, being able to distinguish plain old squares, rectangles, and triangles seems to be an innate, and uniquely human, ability. Researchers are now investigating the neural mechanisms that make this skill possible.

23 February 2026