My heart beats to your tunes only! Kirill Tokarev on how male song promotes monogamy in zebra finch.

You might have seen the reality shows that put multiple bachelors together and it ends up in dramatic cases of cheating and adultery. Mixing attractive people provides a good recipe for amorous behavior. Polygamy should follow in close-knit and passion-filled social environment. However, we do know that individual male-female bonding can arise and be maintained even under such situations. How can monogamy be sustained?

Kirill Tokarev and colleagues used zebra finches as model to understand development of monogamy in a close-knit social structure. Female zebra finches are attracted to the singing of the male song, and in a community, multiple male songs would be heard by the female. Evolution of monogamy would require atleast two conditions:
1. after bonding, females responding to their partner's singing only,
2. to maintain harmony in the society males not being aggressive to other singing males.

How do both these conditions arise in zebra finches? To know that, please listen to Kirill.




To know more, please refer to:
Sexual dimorphism in striatal dopaminergic responses promotes monogamy in social songbirds
Tokarev et al., eLife 2017  

Do you remember the time when... How episodes shape our memories by Jai Yu!

Imagine sitting with your friends chatting about previous trips. You might mention the time when you went to a beautiful waterfall. You mention some details of the event, like the sun, weather and scenery. You can remember the activities from that day. But would you remember the exact duration you were at the waterfall, apart from a crude number? Or what you did the day earlier or the day later. Probably not so clearly. The event became fresh in your memory, but many details were lost to time. How does the brain retain this experience.

Jai and colleagues investigated the phenomena of coding experiences in the brain to understand how the mind recollects past experiences. They used an interesting model where a rat's behavior is monitored while it searches for a reward and then consumes it. The rat's activity gets divided into mobility (searching for reward) and immobility (consumption of reward). The rat's brain uses the changes in activity as switches to break time into discrete chunks. Each chunk becomes an episode and might be processed and saved differently. This way the brain could define interesting parts of experience and save them as separate memories, such as memories of experience on paths to reach rewards versus memories of being at those reward locations. To know more on how this happens, please listen to Jai.



To know more, please refer to:
Distinct hippocampal-cortical memory representations for experiences associated with movement versus immobility
eLife, Aug., 2017

The sugar deception! Interview with Maria Veldhuizen to know if our brain can tricked into uncoupling sweetness from calorie content.

We all know of diet drinks and sugar-free desserts. Such foods have ingredients that are sweet, but low in calorie. The temptation to savor and relish sweet foods without paying the price of high calorie intake is pretty tempting, isn't it? But does taking food items with a mismatch in sweetness and calorie content actually work on our brains? Can our brain detect the disparity?

Maria and colleagues wanted to understand the affect of discrepancy between the sweetness of the food and its calorie content on the brain's response and metabolism. By providing people drinks that were of the same nutritional value, but varying in calorie, they found that the body responded the best when the two things, sweetness and calories, matched. This suggested that calories are not the only factor that trigger metabolic and mental responses. It could be that the brain's reward circuits better register foods that match in their sweetness and nutritional content. This is of great importance because we live in a world where increasing amounts of food contain such mismatches. To know more, please listen to Maria.


To know more, please refer to:
Integration of Sweet Taste and Metabolism Determines Carbohydrate Reward
Maria et al., Current Biology, 2017

Is believing seeing? Interview with Benedikt Ehinger on how humans percieve unreliable information!

We use the information from our senses to make sense of the world. But sometimes, the information can be unreliable. What does our mind do in face of corrupted information?

Benedikt and colleagues wanted to understand how our mind makes sense of the world when faced with unreliable information. They used the model of blind spot, a part of our visual field that does not detect light. Our mind fills-in the blind spot such that we are not aware of its presence. The experiment was set up to find out if we are aware of 'information filling-in', which makes the blind spot a source of unreliable information. Unexpectedly, not only are we not aware of the unreliability of the information, we in-fact prefer the filled-in information from the blind spot over reality. In the words of André Breton, “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” To know more, please listen to Benedikt.


To know more, please refer to:
Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones.
Benedikt Ehinger, et al., eLife, May, 2017

Honeybees to Drones! Interview with Mark Roper on visual detectors for navigation!!

You must have all experienced a honeybee buzz around you, avoiding all your attempts at hitting it. These tiny animals are amazing at navigation. They move around like superman finding little flowers with ease. What makes them so good at navigation?

Mark and colleagues wanted to understand the amazing navigation capabilities of honeybees and generate a model of it. One would imagine that the system would be highly complex, with tons of interactions. But they show that the system can not only be modeled on a very few components, but it has a simplistic architecture. This generates a small and efficient system, which can be useful for helping us generate better navigation algorithm for daily life. As an instance, drones require large amounts of battery power for flying, which restricts the distance they can travel. But using honeybees based navigation system can allow them to be lighter and less power consuming, allowing them to fly much longer distances. Please listen to Mark to know more.



To know more, please refer to:
Insect Bio-inspired Neural Network Provides New Evidence on How Simple Feature Detectors Can Enable Complex Visual Generalization and Stimulus Location Invariance in the Miniature Brain of Honeybees
Roper et al., PLoS Computational Biology, 2017

Listening with eyes! Interview with John Magnotti on deciphering McGurk effect!!

We all have tried to lip-read when we can't hear properly. We try to use visual cues to listen when the audio cue is missing or of bad quality. But did you know that our brain tries to use visual cues even when we can hear nicely. And if the two cues are not in sync, we can get confused. In-fact, we might 'hear' a different sound than what is falling on our ears! Our eyes change our audio perceptions! 

Have a look here:


John and colleagues wanted to understand why the effect occurs. And to do so, they generated a computational model which used an audio and visual cue to predict its perception. They found that an important step in correct perception is deciding if the cue arrives from one or two sources. Knowing the number of origins improves understanding. To know more, please listen to John.


To know more, please refer to:
A Causal Inference Model Explains Perception of the McGurk Effect and Other Incongruent Audiovisual Speech
Magnotti and Beauchamp.  PLoS Comput Biol 2017

Illuminating movements! Interview on motion control by optogenetics by Patrícia Correia.

Our brain controls our every behavior. This includes our simple everyday movements and our deepest thoughts and feelings. But are the mundane and complex processes connected in some way. Or are they processed in entirely different ways. Could there be a unified framework underneath the spectrum of behaviors.

Patricia and colleagues started by investigating the role of serotonin on mouse brain. Serotonin, a neuro-hormone, has been associated with mood and motivation within our brains. They wanted to understand the effect of providing increased amount of serotonin to mouse brain. They did this by using a technique called optogenetics, which is capable of using light to control cellular behavior. In their case, they used optogentics to increase serotonin levels in the brain. Upon doing this, they found a fascinating effect on the animal's locomotive behavior. This suggested that serotonin can controls our movements, possibly by affecting our motivations to carry them out! To know more, please listen to the interview with Patricia.


To know more, please refer to:

Transient inhibition and long-term facilitation of locomotion by phasic optogenetic activation of serotonin neurons.
Correia et al., eLife 2017;6:e20975

In addition, please have a look at wonderful fusion between art and science by Patricia, Roots of Curiosity, and her podcast, Creative Disturbance.

What did you have for dinner last night? Interview with Vishnu Sreekumar on memory formation in the real world!

Isn't is difficult to remember what you had for dinner two night ago, but so easy to remember your first kiss! Why is it difficult to remember few experiences while other stay etched in our memory forever. Of course, we have limited brain capacity, so few things are removed at the expense of others, but how do we evaluate that information; how much decision making goes into paying attention to important tasks for remembering them later onward.

Vishnu Sreekumar and his team work on memory formation in the real world. They utilize information gathering using contemporary technologies to come-up with models that can explain what we look for in experiences when memories are being formed. Their exciting work not only helps model our day-to-day working, but can also help people with better memory retention and improving attention span. To know more, please listen to Vishnu.


For further information please refer to the following publication:
The Episodic Nature of Experience: A Dynamical Systems Analysis.
Sreekumar et al., Cognitive Science, 23 July 2016.