Ann Kennedy | The anatomy of the soul: neural circuits for flexible and adaptive survival behaviors
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group
The anatomy of the soul: neural circuits for flexible and adaptive survival behaviors
Abstract: The struggle for survival require animals to set and weigh off goals in a way that is adaptive and responsive to the context of the environment. Intense evolutionary pressure has wired these algorithms for survival into the connectivity and gene expression patterns of neural circuits. In this talk, I will present a pair of recent studies of the structure of animal behavior and its neural correlates, in which we use theory and modeling to uncover the computational mechanisms by which the brain sets survival goals and weigh off competing survival needs. I will also share our lab's work in using behavioral forecasting as a tool to build generative models of complex animal behavior.
Bio: Ann Kennedy is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, where her lab develops theories and models of adaptive behavior control in diverse species, from mice and rats to flies and jellyfish. Following undergraduate training in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, she pursued a PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior in the theoretical neuroscience laboratory of Larry Abbott at Columbia University, where she studied representation and learning in high dimensional neural populations. She then pursued a postdoctoral appointment in the laboratory of David Anderson at Caltech, studying the role of the hypothalamus in the regulation of survival behaviors. She is broadly interested in brain-inspired computing and in understanding the evolution of complex nervous systems. kennedylab.org
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group
A group of neuroscience researchers, entrepreneurs, and allies advancing beneficial short-term and long-term neurotechnology applications.
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