Dec
11
Wed
Dr. Shushruth from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University will be giving his seminar, “Building Macaque Models of Human Cognitive Impairments” on Wednesday, December 11th at 9:30 AM in A219B Langley Hall, University of Pittsburgh campus.
Pittsburgh Center for Pain Research and
University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute
Presents a Special Seminar:
“A neural circuit that suppresses pain”
Nicholas Betley, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
University of Pennsylvania
Wednesday
December 11th, 2019
4:00 – 5:00pm
Conference Room 1495 BST
Dec
12
Thu
Rob Reinhart
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Boston University
Synchronizing brain rhythms rescues working memory in older people
Working memory is a set of operations that support the temporary retention of behaviorally significant information and is essential for human cognition. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies find robust linear decline in working memory across the adult lifespan, contributing to age-related functional impairments. An enduring goal of neuroscience is to understand the neurobiology of working memory and its decline with advancing age. In this talk, I will present new research investigating the large-scale neurophysiology of working memory maintenance that distinguishes younger (18-30 years) from older people (60-76 years). I will focus on rhythmic neural coding schemes grounded in systems neuroscience for how brains compute and communicate information across different temporal and spatial scales during cognition. Further, I will describe how we have developed individually customized, noninvasive neuromodulation methods for augmenting components of rhythmic electrophysiology and rapidly improving working memory performance in older adults. Drug-free noninvasive neuroscience interventions for improving memory in physiological aging and clinical populations are implicated.
Jan
24
Fri
The Center for Philosophy of Science at Pitt is hosting an Early Career Workshop on Tools and Technology in Neuroscience in January 24-25th, 2020. We are now accepting paper presentation and poster presentation abstracts for theoretical and philosophical topics. The deadline is August 15th.
See the Center’s website for details:
https://www.pitt.edu/~pittcntr/Events/All/Conferences/others/other_conf_2019-20/01-24-20_neurotech/neurotech2020.html
Topics:
Technological innovation has always played a central role in neuroscientific experimentation and theorizing. Historically, Nissl and Golgi staining methods were crucial to allowing researchers to produce data bearing on the neuron doctrine. More recently, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, launched by former President Barack Obama and carried out with support from the NIH, NSF, DARPA, and IARPA, has directed resources into the development of new technologies in the hope that it will improve, or even revolutionize, our understanding of the brain. Additionally, new computational technologies potentially give insight into understanding how to link behaviour to neuroscience in ways that many hope will impact clinical practice.
The aim of this workshop is to explore how tools and technology have advanced neuroscience and cognitive science and consider their epistemological and broader philosophical implications. We are inviting abstract submissions linked to the workshop’s main questions:
1) How are new technologies in neuroscience assessed and revised?
2) How have new technologies in neuroscience advanced debates in (philosophy of) cognitive science?
We welcome any abstracts related to the overall theme of the workshop on tools and technology in neuroscience though preference may be given to those that directly address the main questions. In delimiting what counts as technology, we include both instruments and devices that can be portable to different experimental contexts, but also techniques, protocols and modelling tools. Examples could include (but are not limited to): CLARITY, Scale, SeeDB, fMRI, Deep Brain Stimulation, text/data mining methods, connectomics, MVPA, machine learning, Brain-computer interfaces, DREADDs, optogenetics and TMS. We hope this workshop encourages a substantive dialogue between researchers in neuroscience/cognitive science and philosophy. To facilitate this, each contributed talk will be paired with a commentator who is a senior faculty member in philosophy/neuroscience as appropriate.
We hope you will share this call with relevant early career researchers and consider submitting if you are an early career researcher.
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