Rafael Yuste: Can You See a Thought? Neuronal Ensembles as Emergent Units of Cortical Function 

IBM Research hosts a fascinating seminar with Rafael Yuste, a world leader in optical methods for brain research. According to Professor Yuste, lifting neuroscience studies from looking at neurons one at a time to ensembles or functional units is key in our quest to understanding how brains work.
Rafael Yuste is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Neuroscience at Columbia University and Co-director of the Kavli Foundations Institute for Neural Circuitry. He recently helped launch the BRAIN Initiative, a large-scale scientific project to systematically record and manipulate the activity of complete neural circuits.
In this seminar, Rafael Yuste shows the results from his group’s two-photon holographic methods to selectively image and manipulate the activity of neuronal populations in 3D in vivo. These experiments - from imaging neuron activities, triggering of neuron ensemble activities, and even altering behavioral choices bi-directionally - are shedding light on the possibility of neuronal ensembles being functional building blocks of cortical circuits.

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