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Congratulations to Professor Emery N. Brown, who this morning received an honorary doctorate of medical sciences @yale in recognition of his #neuroscience, #statistics and #anesthesiology research.

🐈Amid finals and in advance of graduation, two of our most prestigious 'Purr-fessors,' Kinje and Torbie, held office hours at a cat cafe today, arranged by the lab of Professor Myriam Heiman. Attendees could also grab a boba tea, macarons and do cat crafts. Thanks to @mitscience for the quality of life grant! @mit_bcs

🐈Amid finals and in advance of graduation, two of our most prestigious 'Purr-fessors,' Kinje and Torbie, held office hours at a cat cafe today, arranged by the lab of Professor Myriam Heiman. Attendees could also grab a boba tea, macarons and do cat crafts. Thanks to @mitscience for the quality of life grant! @mit_bcs

🐈Amid finals and in advance of graduation, two of our most prestigious 'Purr-fessors,' Kinje and Torbie, held office hours at a cat cafe today, arranged by the lab of Professor Myriam Heiman. Attendees could also grab a boba tea, macarons and do cat crafts. Thanks to @mitscience for the quality of life grant! @mit_bcs

🐈Amid finals and in advance of graduation, two of our most prestigious 'Purr-fessors,' Kinje and Torbie, held office hours at a cat cafe today, arranged by the lab of Professor Myriam Heiman. Attendees could also grab a boba tea, macarons and do cat crafts. Thanks to @mitscience for the quality of life grant! @mit_bcs

"I had a conductor in middle school county honor band who had Parkinson's disease. He had the typical symptoms of rigidity and bradykinesia, but incredibly, he could conduct. Something about the organized pattern of music allowed him to conduct even though he struggled to move otherwise. This made me realize there's something special about music in the brain. I was inspired by that. In high school, I worked on a science fair project, applying calculus I’d learned to model neural activity. The goal was to explain perception of a cool optical illusion, but I also wanted to tie the work to Parkinson's . I included a parameter to model the loss of dopamine in Parkinson’s, and as I fiddled around with different parameters, I was able to simulate a range of neural activity—from what might happen viewing the optical illusion to aberrant synchronous activity that happens in Parkinson’s. When I presented my project to my class, I had the students raise their hands if they had a family member or knew somebody who had Parkinson’s. I was shocked by how many people raised their hands. I earned a fellowship related to this project. In my acceptance speech, I spoke about how my inspiration traced back to my middle-school music experience. Afterward, somebody came up to me and said they had Parkinson's disease, with all the difficulty moving, but they found that if they put their hands together in a certain way, stabilizing their fingertips, they could somehow lower their hands to the piano and play fluidly. It was a full-circle moment. Not only did it reinforce that this research area affected so many people’s lives, but it meant that there was something magical about music for his brain, too. Music touches everyone's life, and the power of music to help people just seems so strong. To me, playing music is powerful in and of itself, but trying to understand why it can help people really fueled my journey to understand how brain activity is changed by neurodegeneration, or, more recently, neurodevelopmental disorders. Really, I ended up doing neuroscience because of music. It’s been a winding path, but I think ultimately it came down to realizing how many lives this touches."

Even in the primary visual cortex, a brain region named for its specialized role in processing basic features of what the eyes see, not every neuron ends up answering the call to process properties of visual input. Maybe that’s because each neuron receives a wide variety of inputs via thousands of circuit connections, or “synapses,” and has to opt to respond to the visual information vs. something else. In a new study in mice, neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT reveal how neurons that perform visual processing bring order to this input to get the job done. In this video from the research, we see the moment when an electrical signal propagates from the cell body, or soma, back through a dendrite, reaching synapses on the dendrite's spines. #neuroscience #vision #brain @mit_bcs @mitscience

Happy "Cat-sual Fur-day"! The lab of Professor Myriam Heiman treated our whole building to a cat cafe featuring Torbie, Cleo, and Kinje. Hoomans also got Boba tea!

Happy "Cat-sual Fur-day"! The lab of Professor Myriam Heiman treated our whole building to a cat cafe featuring Torbie, Cleo, and Kinje. Hoomans also got Boba tea!

Happy "Cat-sual Fur-day"! The lab of Professor Myriam Heiman treated our whole building to a cat cafe featuring Torbie, Cleo, and Kinje. Hoomans also got Boba tea!

Happy "Cat-sual Fur-day"! The lab of Professor Myriam Heiman treated our whole building to a cat cafe featuring Torbie, Cleo, and Kinje. Hoomans also got Boba tea!

Happy "Cat-sual Fur-day"! The lab of Professor Myriam Heiman treated our whole building to a cat cafe featuring Torbie, Cleo, and Kinje. Hoomans also got Boba tea!

"I have always loved learning things. I used to go over to my grandparents' house every Friday night for Shabbat dinner. And then I would sleep over. My grandfather was a professor of biochemistry and medical doctor at the University of Toronto. He was a polymath. He loved all topics, including history and music. He was an amazing singer, and we used to play a lot of music. On Saturday mornings he would teach me history and biology and a lot of math. He would often talk to me about things I didn't really understand yet. Once he was trying to teach me trigonometry, and I just ended up writing a bunch of random ‘sins’ and ‘tans’ on a piece of paper. And I asked him, "is this right?" He just said, “no, not at all." I don't think I understood the concept of an angle, which was probably a barrier to doing it correctly. He really loved astronomy, too. I remember we used to go to an inn in northern Ontario every year as a family. He had a huge telescope that he would always bring up. One night, when we were looking out at the moons of Jupiter—we used to try and identify them—and he was trying to convey this idea of infinitude and the expansiveness of the universe, and you know, how insignificant we are in the scope of it. I remember being absolutely awestruck. I couldn't even process that concept, that feeling of being a speck of dust in the universe. I think, in a way that appreciation of our insignificance has affected me. In college I took three electives. Existentialism was one, and yeah, I do think that has influenced my perspective. There’s a general perspective, which I think aligns with this idea of our smallness in the universe, that nothing we do actually matters in the scope of reality. And that doesn't mean that nothing is worth doing. It just means you have to create your own meaning. I love people. I think I got into neuroscience because I wanted to understand myself better and I want to understand people better. The only tool that I have to understand anything is math. And so, I figured this would be the most interesting thing, to apply math to people. I think it brings me meaning to understand people because I feel like I can connect with them better.”

How neurons sense bacteria in the gut: To understsand the mechanisms that enable the bacterial microbiome to influence brain function, a new study examines them at work in a model “bacterial specialist,” C. elegans. Here the little worms wriggle through a gel-like medium amid the harmful red-hued bacteria Serratia marcescens. The neuron NSM senses prodigiosin in the bacteria so that it doesn't swallow it. More at link in our bio. Study in @currentbiology led by Cassi Estrem in the lab of Steven Flavell #neuroscience @mit_bcs @mitscience

"Me and my mom and dad, we're all huge fans of going to visit lighthouses. It started off when I was 5. We were going on a vacation to Cape May in New Jersey. They have a lighthouse there. My parents thought it might be a good idea to climb it and for whatever reason it clicked with me. After that, my parents found that they could get me to sit through any car ride however long if there was a lighthouse at the end. So we started going through the ones in New Jersey. It kind of just ballooned out from there. Whenever we visited my grandparents down in Georgia, we threw in a lighthouse trip near Savannah—then Florida. When I was 10, we went on a road trip out to the West Coast, started in Southern California and took three weeks to ride up the coast just visiting lighthouses. There was one close to Olympia National Park, situated at the end of this long sandy spit of land—a 5-mile hike out and back. I didn't complain at all—10-year-old me who hated any form of exercise. These lighthouses are monuments to history and an era that's bygone but still relevant to us today. I think just learning about the stories associated with these places is one thing that’s really resonated with me…Another thing that makes this hobby really persistent for me is it's a way for me to connect with my parents. We've literally gone to the obscure corners of America because you find these lighthouses in the most interesting places. The Saint George Reef lighthouse is in the very tip of Northern California, close to the Redwood forests. It’s only accessible via helicopter since it's about 5 miles off the coast on this escarpment of rock that you can't land a boat on. So we get loaded into this decommissioned military helicopter and set out across the ocean and land on this narrow landing pad. It takes skill and dexterity for the pilots. And then we go up to the very top and when I'm standing there at the gallery, looking out to the horizon, it feels like I am literally on the edge of the Earth. There's nothing as far as the eye can see except waves pounding below me, and the horizon. It's just a very cool feeling, kind of like peace. Like you're away from the troubles of the world."

Introducing a new series, starting tomorrow! We are our people, not just our papers. Via "Lives in the Labs" connect with a member of our community every few weeks and learn more about what we do "beyond the bench."

Though many studies approach the developmental disorder #Rettsyndrome as a single condition arising from general loss of function in the gene MECP2, a new study by neuroscientists in The Picower Institute at MIT shows that two different mutations of the gene caused many distinct abnormalities in lab cultures. Moreover, correcting key differences made by each mutation required different treatments. “Individual mutations matter,” says Mriganka Sur, senior author of the new study in Nature Communications. “This is an approach to personalizing treatment, even for a single-gene disorder.” The study employed advanced 3D human brain tissue cultures called “organoids” or “minibrains” derived from skin cells or blood cells donated by Rett syndrome patients with each mutation. Several views of the organoids are shown here. Lead author Tatsuya Osaki, a Picower Institute research scientist, said that the organoids’ ability to model the specific consequences of each mutation enabled him to gain mutation-specific insights that haven’t emerged in prior studies where scientists have just knocked out MECP2 overall. The organoids also provided a novel opportunity to understand how each mutation affected different cell types and their interactions. #neuroscience @mit_bcs @mitscience

A complete rethinking of how our brains use categories to make sense of the world! Challenging the classic view, two cognitive scientists argue in a new review that categorization is not a late, specialized stage of sensory processing. Instead, it is a core function operating at every level, anticipating bodily needs and motor plans. Categories are thus not fixed prototypes stored in “higher” areas of cortex, but dynamically constructed from prior experience throughout all of sensory processing. In “Categorization is Baked into the Brain,” cognitive scientists @lfeldmanbarrett University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern, and @earlkmiller, Picower Professor at MIT, contend that categorization is part of a predictive process the brain uses to efficiently meet the body’s needs in a fast-paced, otherwise overwhelming sensory world. In that sense, their paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience challenges decades of dogma about how and why the brain boils down what it sees, hears, smells, tastes and feels. Learn more via link in our bio. #neuroscience #cognition @mitscience @mit_bcs @northeastern

With navigating nematodes, scientists map out how brains implement behaviors. A new MIT study from the lab of Steven Flavell maps exactly what happens in the brains of C. elegans worms when they “follow their nose” to savor attractive odors or avoid unappealing ones. #neuroscience @mitscience @mit_bcs Find out more via link in our bio