Blog | Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

SWC Speaker series - Zeynep Okray - Blog Banner

Multisensory learning: insights from fruit flies

How does the brain integrate sensory information from different modalities during learning and in what way does this relate to memory performance? In this Q&A, SWC Emerging Neuroscientist Seminar Series (ENSS) speaker Dr Zeynep Okray and her research colleague Dr Pedro Jacob, explain their research in fruit flies to tackle these big research questions.

SWC Speaker series - Megha Sehgal - Blog Banner

Memory linking in dendritic branches

In the third Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series (ENSS) talk of 2022/23, Dr Megha Sehgal shared her work exploring dendritic mechanisms of memory linking over time. In this Q&A, she encourages future ENSS applicants and explains how her work furthers the understanding of learning and memory at the sub-neuronal level.

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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?

SWC Speaker series - Ning-long Xu - Blog Banner

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.

SWC Speaker series - Ahmed El Hady - Blog Banner

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.

SWC Speaker series - Neir Esehl - Blog Banner

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.

SWC Speaker series - Ehud Ahissar - Blog Banner

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.