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Episodic memory, or memory for autobiographical experiences, has the remarkable feature that each remembered experience happened exactly once, and yet exists in memory for decades. How does the brain capture fleeting experiences and transform them into patterns of neural activity that are stable over our lives?
Read MoreToday, our guest is Tomomi Shimogori, Team Leader of the Lab for Molecular Mechanisms of Thalamus Development, at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. We’ll be speaking with her about cortical development, studying development in marmosets, and growing up around the globe.
Though domesticated pumpkins and other gourds (think zucchinis, acorn squashes, butternut squashes), are edible (and tasty!), their wild cousins produce a toxic bitter compound, rendering them poisonous to humans, even in small amounts. Anyone who has ever picked a pumpkin and hauled it home might be wondering…why on earth would a plant produce fruit weighing more-than-some-dogs that no one can eat?
Well, its turns out there's an answer. And it involves some Jurassic Park level science (but better, because it's real). Read on, fellow nerds…
Read MoreToday, our guest is Prof. Robert Edwards, the Cahill Professor of Neurology and Physiology at UCSF. In this episode, we will talk about uptake of neurotransmitter into vesicles for release at the synapse, co-release of dopamine and glutamate, and how a young soul happily found his way to science.
Today, our guest is Dr. Tianyi Mao, Assistant Scientist and Principal Investigator at the Vollum Institute. We’ll talk about dissecting thalamo-cortical circuits in a systematic way; using sCRACM to understand how circuits are wired; how this approach and these maps could help us understand cortico-striatal-thalamic loops; and, how Dr. Mao’s got to where she is today.
Our guest is in this episode is Takaki Komiyama, a professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Neurosciences and in the Neurobiology Section of the Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior.
Small blast from the past: this episode was recorded in October, 2014, but never broadcast; we wanted to bring this back from our archives and present it to you now, because it’s a great interview!
In this interview, we talk about the anatomy of the sense of smell, baseball (Royals fans, sorry this was 2014...but we're in 2015 now), and neural ensembles in motor cortex during learning. Please enjoy!
Today, our guest is Nils Brose, Professor and Director of the Dept. of Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Göttingen, Germany. We speak with him about the mechanisms of neurotransmitter release, how synapses might be built, and the role of the luck in the career of a scientist.
Pregnant women who are hospitalized for infections, including the flu, have a slightly higher risk for giving birth to a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism. What's going on? Is the immune system influencing the developing brain?
Spoilers: yes. And it all starts when immune cells (microglia) are lured into the brain by the siren call of neural progenitor cells.
Read MoreMolecular biology is still defined by its "central dogma," but we often don’t use the word dogma in science unless we are about to contradict it. Here, Nick Kramer tells us about how circular RNAs, a newly discovered, highly conserved class of RNA molecules, are abundant in the brain and may contribute to its development.
Read MoreToday we'll be speaking with Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Carson Family Professor and at Rockefeller University. We'll be speaking with him about fundamental discoveries of new axon guidance molecules; his career path including many roles in both basic and translational science; and exciting unsolved mysteries in the field of axon guidance.
[Note: Our S5E6 interview with last week's speaker, Tianyi Mao, upcoming!]
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Note: The NeuWrite West team consists of research scientists. Therefore, we can not provide answers to questions of a medical nature; we are not medical doctors.
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