Art is often said to be a universal language. Allowing us to transcend boundaries and communicate complex ideas, it is appealing to explore how the interface between art, science and technology could open up new perspectives in neuroscience. Line of Sight, an interactive art installation unveiled today at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, offers us that exciting prospect.

The Schmidt Science Polymath program has today announced a $2.5m award to Associate Professor Andrew Saxe, joint Group Leader at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University College London (UCL).

Understanding how brain areas communicate is one of the oldest questions in neuroscience. Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL used causal techniques to uncover how two neocortical areas in the brain communicate with one another and found that their influence on each other changes over much faster-timescales than previously thought.

Neuroscientists at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL observed the neuronal activity in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) while rats freely engaged with a variety of different ethological stimuli. Interactions with ethological stimuli are relevant to the animal’s survival and to the propagation of its genes, and include food, prey and conspecifics. In a new study, published today in Cell Reports, the researchers demonstrate strong responses to these classes of events in the BLA.