The Constant Chatter of Neurons

“The brain isn’t like a computer that turns off when it’s not doing a particular task”, explains Alfonso Renart, the senior author of the study published in eLife. “There’s always a kind of background hum, a baseline activity that can sometimes make it seem as if the brain is chattering to itself”. The team’s study lifts the lid on how that baseline activity, the continuous stream of electrical impulses sent by neurons, impacts behaviour and decision-making.

Many animals rely on smell to identify and locate objects in their surroundings and to respond appropriately. To investigate this phenomenon further, Greg Jefferis’ group in the LMB’s Neurobiology Division established a collaboration with the Behavior and Metabolism Lab, lead by Carlos Ribeiro, at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) and the group of  Drosophila Connectomics at Cambridge University and together studied Drosophila flies.

Champalimaud Foundation (Fundação D. Anna de Sommer Champalimaud e Dr. Carlos Montez Champalimaud), a private, non-profit research institution in Lisbon, Portugal, is looking for a Research Technician or Master student to join our team at the Champalimaud Research Programme.

The selected candidate will

Perform behavioural and functional imaging experiments with zebrafish larvae and fruit flies in a project that aims to elucidate how these animals escape predation.

Expected position starting date

1st June 2023

#CRSy23 #BrainBodyWorld23 aims to foster the discussion of how internal states, such as hunger, thirst, and emotion, are generated and regulated by the brain, and how they interact with the body and the external world to drive behaviour. 

29th April is the birthday of Jean-Georges Noverre, creator of modern ballet, and to commemorate this, since 1982 it has also been International Dance Day. This day is dedicated to celebrating dance, revelling in the universality of this art form (across all political, cultural and ethnic barriers), and bringing people together within a common ‘language’. 

The second edition of the European Researchers’ Night (ERN), organised by the RAISE - Researchers in Action for Inclusion in Science and Education consortium will be held on the 29th of September 2023 and will, once again, take place at the Champalimaud Foundation (Lisbon).

The main goal of this public event, organised by consortium partners, Native Scientists, Champalimaud Foundation and Instituto de Medicina Molecular, is to promote, actively and effectively, diversity and inclusion in science and education.

A study published today, April 13th, in the journal Nature Neuroscience provides a surprising answer to this question by showing that, rather than committing to a single strategy, the brain can compute multiple alternative decision strategies simultaneously.

The study, led by Fanny Cazettes and senior authors Zachary Mainen and Alfonso Renart, at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, performed a specially-designed experiment which used a kind of “virtual reality” setup for mice, in which the animals were tasked with searching for water in a virtual world. 

Modern scientific endeavours are often guided by the positivistic ideal of obtaining a neutral, detached point of observation from which truths about the world can be deduced and believed to hold independently of the socio-political context in which they were obtained.