Abstract
Virtually every cortical area is associated with its own primary and high-order thalamic nuclei. While primary nuclei are well understood to relay sensory information from the periphery to the cortex, they account for little of thalamus. Thalamus is mainly comprised of high-order nuclei, whose functions have been elusive. Theoretical roles for high-order sensory nuclei have spanned complex sensory processing, motor efference copy aggregation, egocentric representation, and spatial- and feature-based attention. Recent rodent studies from my lab and others, which I will discuss, have not found strong evidence for these theories. Most recently, we leveraged comparisons of high-order somatosensory (PO) and visual thalamus (pulvinar, LP) and found these two nuclei are highly synchronized despite being interconnected with separate sensory modalities. Both nuclei appear to encode the occurrence of salient or behaviourally relevant events, regardless of any associated stimulus modality. High-order thalamus may exist to enhance cortical plasticity to facilitate learning of behavioural tasks.
Biography
Randy Bruno is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics. Fascinated by the prospect of artificial intelligence but realizing the need to first explore human intelligence, he pursued a B.S. in Cognitive Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Wanting to explore not just the software but also the “wet hardware” of the mind, he went on to a Ph.D. in Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh with Professor Daniel J. Simons, one of the pioneers in using the rodent whisker-barrels system. He conducted postdoctoral research with the Nobel laureate Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York prior to moving his laboratory to the University of Oxford. The lab investigates how the circuitry of the cerebral cortex enables sensory behaviours. They previously demonstrated that the upper and deeper layers of cortex can operate independently. A major focus of his current research is to understand how these two halves of cortex contribute to behaviour and how secondary thalamic nuclei alter cortical processing. His work has earned him several honors, including the 2013 Society for Neuroscience’s Young Investigator Award.