Blog

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.

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.

“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.

How do we extract essential features from the activity of billions of neurons in the brain? In a SWC Seminar, Dr. Kanaka Rajan shared her work using recurrent neural networks constrained directly by experimental recordings, a special class of artificial neural network models, to figure out how real brains learn.