Daniel Wolpert, FMedSci FRS
Royal Society Research Professor & Professor of Engineering
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge

Probabilistic models of sensorimotor control and decision making
The effortless ease with which we move our arms, our eyes, even our lips when we speak masks the true complexity of the control processes involved. I  will review our work on how  humans learn to make skilled movements covering probabilistic models of  learning, including  Bayesian and structural learning,  the role of context in activating motor memories and the intimate interaction between decision making and sensorimotor control.

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Anissa Abi-Dargham, MD
Columbia University & New York Psychiatric Institute

The topography of dopamine dysfunction in schizophrenia
The lecture will take an in-depth look at the cumulative knowledge gained from PET imaging studies of dopamine in schizophrenia including recent findings relating to cortical and extrastriatal regions.  The translational and multimodal imaging studies designed to understand the functional impact and the mechanisms associated with the dopaminergic dysregulation will also be discussed.    

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Tim Behrens
Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain

Storing, using and updating knowledge for behavioural control
I will present a number of studies where we have tried to look at how basic models of the world are stored in the brain to allow flexible control of behaviour.  These studies try to investigate neural codes and mechanisms that are used to organise this knowledge in a form that can be used efficiently and flexibly. I will mostly focus on interactions between frontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe, but might occasionally stray into sensory cortices.   The neuronal codes and mechanisms I will be talking about are often stolen from or related to studies in animal models, so there might also be some methodological interest in how we can go about measuring more mechanistic types of signals in humans.

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Susan Bookheimer, PhD
UCLA School of Medicine

The Uniquely Human Hippocampus
The human hippocampus is a highly conserved brain structure bearing close anatomical resemblance to that of the rat. Nonetheless, animal research into hippocampal function has focused primarily on neural populations coding memory for aspects of spatial navigation, while descriptions of human memory more often examine  memory functions that are uniquely human (such as verbal and declarative memory for distinct learning episodes). This talk will  present multi-modal, high-resolution studies of hippocampal structure, function, and connectivity  to address two questions: How can a structure so similar across species give rise to such uniquely human memory capabilities? Why is a structure so fundamental to our functioning as humans so vulnerable to damage throughout the lifespan? 

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Fernando Lopes Da Silva, MD, PhD
University of Amsterdam

Functional and causal relationships based on  EEG/MEG signals
In this lecture I focus on the contention that biophysical models of the interactions between neural systems are necessary, although not sufficient, to obtain meaningful estimates of functional and effective relationships, including phase and time delays, and to be able to derive relevant causal relations, based on EEG/MEG signals.

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Max Planck Institute & New York University

New Directions in the Neurobiology of Language
The last twenty years have seen dramatic progress on the "where-is-language?” question. More recent developments, at the nexus of language research and neurophysiology, provide new views on “how?” questions. I discuss experiments on specialization for speech and structure for language that point towards mechanisms underpinning this foundational human ability.    

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William W. Seeley, MD
Associate Professor of Neurology and Pathology Director, UCSF Neurodegenerative Disease Brain Bank, UCSF Memory & Aging Center

Network-based Neurodegeneration
The anatomy of neurodegenerative disease can be understood in terms of two key aspects: onset and progression. Mechanisms controlling onset timing and location remain mysterious, and each disease features striking heterogeneity in its onset sites. Regarding progression, network analyses have revealed that each clinical syndrome reflects degeneration of a specific large-scale network. Each vulnerable network, in turn, is anchored by a pivotal “epicenter” whose functional-anatomical connections govern the vulnerability of other regions, perhaps because prion-like corruptive templating begets trans-synaptic disease protein spread. I will illustrate these principles with a focus on the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).  BvFTD begins within the “salience network,” a system anchored by the anterior cingulate and frontoinsular cortices and specialized for social-emotional-autonomic processing. Patients with bvFTD lose the capacity for adaptive, real-time behavioral guidance, possibly in part because salience-driven viscero-autonomic cues and responses are late, degraded, or improperly modulated.  Within the salience network hubs, Layer 5 von Economo neurons and fork cells show a particular predilection for disease protein aggregation and cell death, providing a cellular focus for bvFTD selective vulnerability research and a potential window into the neural computations that contribute to sophisticated human social-emotional functions.
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Nora D. Volkow, MD
National Institute on Drug Abuse

Mapping Addiction in the Human Brain
Studies pairing brain imaging technology with behavioral measurements, and more recently genetics, are revealing intricate details about neurochemical and functional changes that occur in an addict’s brain. And understanding addiction-related disruptions in reward, motivation, memory and self-control brain circuits is transforming treatment development strategies.

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