Blog | Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

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Developing Heron, the progeny of Bonsai and ROS

Taking an idea for an experiment and bringing it to life, from scratch, is no easy feat. But what if there was a platform that enabled you to take your mental schema of any desired experiment and construct the necessary hardware and software in a way that results in a clean, easy-to-understand code base that also deals well with subsequent updates?

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How do neural circuits implement flexible decisions?

When you visit a country that drives on the opposite side of the road than you usually do, you are able to quickly adapt. How does the brain allow us to apply such rule-dependent flexible behaviour? In this Q&A, recent SWC seminar speaker, Dr Ning-long Xu explains his research to understand context-dependent flexible behaviour.

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Unravelling the diversity of foraging strategies

Foraging for food is critical for survival. This ubiquitous natural behaviour involves multiple different cognitive computations. Recent SWC Seminar speaker, Dr Ahmed El Hady, is working to unravel the diversity of foraging strategies across environments.

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Probing the role of dopamine in motivational states

How can an economics concept about consumption and cost be applied to understanding motivational states in the brain? In a recent SWC Seminar, Professor Neir Eshel shared his research on how dopamine release in the reward system of the brain depends on varying levels of cost and benefits in a given situation.

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Converging toward closed-loop perception

In a recent SWC Seminar, Professor Ehud Ahissar discussed accumulating evidence in support for perception being a closed-loop, brain-world convergence process. In this Q&A, he untangles what such terms might mean and the implications of his key findings.

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Making data sharing easier for neuroscience

The NeuroDataShare 2023 conference, hosted at SWC last month, centred around collectively addressing the challenge of how neuroscience data can be structured to facilitate reuse.

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Understanding hippocampal predictive maps: a three-pronged approach

Last week, works from three groups were published in eLife, jointly addressing the question of how the hippocampus learns to predict the future state of the animal given the current state, known as the successor representation. The three papers offer different angles from which to understand this phenomenon.

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Will artificial general intelligence one day be conscious?

With the rise of ChatGPT, we may be feeling a step closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the quest to create AI that can solve any general task that a human can. But even if we could create AGI, would it ever be conscious and how would we know? We spoke with 10 leading neuroscientists, who have all given seminars at SWC, to find out their thoughts. Here are their takes.

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Will AI ever be as flexible as human intelligence?

From search engines to how we work, artificial intelligence is on the rise in many aspects of our daily lives. At SWC, we are interested in how the brain produces flexible behaviours in response to changing environments. Do leading neuroscientists think AI will ever be as flexible as human intelligence? We spoke with 17 SWC seminar speakers to find out. Here are their thoughts.

Masis Saxe eLife 2023

Learning to learn: sacrificing short-term reward for long-term gain

Choosing what to learn and deciding how to do so is a huge decision. Such choices can have significant long-term impact and we often decide to sacrifice a lot in the short-term to gain a bigger future reward. Neuroscientists are starting to unpack whether and why our brains may prioritise learning early on to yield considerable advantages long-term.

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How do you define intelligence in the context of behaviour?

Research at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre focuses on understanding the biology of intelligence by uncovering the neural algorithms supporting adaptive behaviour. But how is intelligence defined in the context of behaviour? We sat down with 13 leading neuroscientists following their seminars at SWC Seminar to find out their thoughts. Here are six takes.

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Simple pleasures: regulating feeding and social interactions

How does the brain coordinate multiple, and sometimes competing, basic needs? In a SWC Seminar, Professor Tatiana Korotkova shared her research on regulating behaviours like feeding and social interactions. In this Q&A, she touches on why her lab focuses on the lateral hypothalamus, the techniques they are using to investigate and some surprising findings to date.