Get those auditory neurons firing! This blogpost is an update to my post from 3 years ago on neuroscience podcasts. I’m a complete podcast addict and believe that podcasts are the way of the future—they’re a great way to learn while you commute, do chores, or exercise. Podcasts let you adjust the speed of what you’re listening to and pause to […]

I’m trying to collect all of the lectures relevant to songbirds into one place. I’m going to start by combing  through some sources I’m already familiar with like podcasts. If I leave any out, please post them in the comments and I’ll try to update the main post. Thanks! Songbird lectures sorted by date: Sam […]

Introduction Differences between direct an indirect MSNs are not obvious from morphology or electrophysiology. However, the two cell types and pathways can be separated and selectively manipulated using genetic tools, such as lines of reporter mice that express GFP in either D1 or D2 expressing MSNs, so many recent studies have tried to sort apart […]

People and animals do not always make ‘rational’ choices that maximize the amount of reward they receive. For example, deviations from ‘rational’ economic decision making include risk aversion and decreasing marginal utility of a given reward. But what determines this utility?

Try and cross your eyes to make the top gridded circles overlap. Give up? Try doing it on the bottom ones that are surrounded by the border. A lot easier, right? The square surrounding the circles helps your eyes stabilize as you cross them. Also notice how your eyes process the diagonal lines themselves. Your […]

Found this book at a bookstore and was hooked after reading the first few pages, based on it’s topic and clear and well-written prose. Chapter 1 James Davies, with a PhD in social and medical anthropology from Oxford, begins with a history of psychiatry starting in the 1970s and a crisis of confidence it faced. A […]

Joe Paton from the Saltzman lab – Time encoding cells in the rodent striatum. You can use an operant conditioning train animals to press a lever and get a reward. Using a fixed interval paradigm, you then do not reward the animal for lever presses until a certain time interval is passed. Animals will learn […]

In 1972, Horace Barlow, great-grandson of Darwin, wrote an article in which he put forth “A neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology?” (The question mark at the end shows that Barlow was a contemplative guy.) With this doctrine, Barlow tried to relate the firing of neurons in sensory pathways with subjectively experienced sensation. One of the […]

First off, I wanted to say I’m working in a songbird lab now, so while I’m keeping this a general neuroscience blog, you’re probably going to start seeing more blogposts about bird brains. So, is the bird vocal learning pathway specialized for song and independent from other tasks? A new paper by the Okanoya lab […]

 Zebra finch genetics The zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, is an Australian songbird with a black and white striped breast. It is used by neuroscientists as a model organism to study the learning and production of a complex motor behavior–birdsong. Like other songbirds[1], zebra finches are genetically predisposed to learn their species’ particular song, but they […]