Neuro Seminar: Friday, March 4 @ 3pm EST

Balance between protective and harmful subsets of microglia in an aging brain. Dr. Pinar Ayata (Advanced Science Research Center, CUNY).

Microglia, the resident macrophages of the brain, perform homeostatic functions that support the health and function of neurons and are implicated in neurological disorders. The first part of the talk will focus on the brain region-specific diversity of microglia and an epigenetic mechanism underpinning their diversity, which is necessary for normal brain function. Second part of the talk will focus on the transcriptional and signaling mechanisms governing the diversity of microglia in Alzheimer's Disease, where some subsets prevent disease progression while others aggravate it. Together these results attribute a critical role for the population balance of microglia in neurodegeneration

Please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to join

Neuro Seminar: Friday 2/25, Barbara Knowlton

Value-directed remembering. Barbara Knowlton, Ph.D. (UCLA)

Friday, February 25, 3:00pm

please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link.

The ability to prioritize valuable information is critical for the efficient use of memory in daily life. When information is important, we engage more effective encoding mechanisms that can better support later retrieval. I will describe a dual-mechanism framework of value-directed remembering in which both strategic and automatic processes lead to the differential encoding of valuable information and depend on different brain mechanisms. Strategic processes rely on awareness of effective deep encoding strategies that allow younger and healthy older adults to selectively remember important information. This ability relies on specifically engaging left hemisphere regions involved in semantic processing when encoding valuable information. In contrast, some high-value information may also be encoded automatically in the absence of intention to remember and this ability may be impaired in older age. This automatic enhancement of encoding of high-value items may be supported by activation of midbrain dopaminergic projections to the hippocampal region.

Fri 2/4 @ 3pm EST CUNY Neuro Seminar - Michael Goldberg

To join: email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for a Zoom link to the seminar.

Corollary Discharge and Proprioception: two brain mechanisms for spatially accurate movement.

Michael E.  Goldberg M.D. (Columbia University)

A longstanding problem in cognitive psychology is to understand how the brain can turn the spatially unreliable retinal signal into a spatially accurate visual signal for action and perception.  Two great 19th century neuroscientists proposed very different solutions to the problem.  Herman von Helmholtz postulated that the motor system could feed information about upcoming eye and head movements to the visual system to compensate for those movements.  Sir Charles Sherington postulated that the brain could use proprioception to measure where the eyes are in the orbit and where the head is on the shoulders and calculate where an object is in space from those data.  I will present evidence demonstrating that the brain uses both of these strategies to achieve a spatially accurate representation of the visual world.

Friday (12/10) Neuro Seminar: Itamar Grunfeld & Liat Kofler

Graduate students take over the CUNY Neuro seminar, with our own Itamar speaking.

3:00pm EST - Liat Koefler (Gao Lab, Brooklyn College): “Autonomic nervous system activity and social influences on psychopathic traits in children”

3:30pm EST - Itamar Grunfeld (Likhtik Lab, Hunter College): “Chronic social defeat stress leads to overgeneralized fear and impaired safety learning through disrupted communication between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex.”

email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to seminar