Recent news about neuroscience and the brain from across Columbia.
Neuroscientist Charles Zuker has long been challenging conventional wisdom on how the tongue and brain process taste.
Ken Shepard is part of a growing push to develop brain-computer interfaces to repair senses and skills lost to injury or disease.
Pay attention to Malia Mason. She’s certainly paying attention to you. An associate professor at Columbia Business School, she examines how people regulate their attention—or don’t—and what implications that may have for students, managers and employees.
Forget nature vs. nurture. Scientists now know that maternal behavior can change offspring in ways that may be passed on to future generations.
Of the 50 million people who suffer from epilepsy worldwide, a third fail to respond to medication. As the search for better drugs continues, researchers are still trying to make sense of how seizures start and spread.
In the first pair of videos, the neurons of mice given the anesthetic ketamine to induce signs of schizophrenia fired-off haphazardly (right), compared to the coordinated firing of neurons in the healthy mice (left). Researchers saw a similar pattern in mice genetically engineered to show signs of schizophrenia, with the neurons at right firing more intermittently.
To understand the workings of an enormously complex brain, it’s sometimes best to look at a simpler one. Rudy Behnia, whose research centers on vision, studies fruit flies for just that reason.
An innovative digital art installation on the ground floor of the new Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus invites visitors to peer inside the brain and meet the neuroscientists who are working upstairs to unravel its complexities. The multiscreen floor-to-ceiling work, Brain Index, loops through large-scale models of the brain while telling the stories of individual researchers and their quests to push the boundaries of neuroscience.
