Department of Neurobiology
University of California, San Diego
Friday, June 22, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Rangos I, University Center, CMU campus
(IGERT Research Symposium Keynote Address)
Abstract
Everything we know about the external world comes to us by means
of the senses, and in mammals most sensory information must pass
through a relay station in the thalamus to enter the brain. I
will discuss visual information flow at the level of this relay.
This relatively simple system allows us to explore many important
general issues: is our internal representation of the visual
world related at all to external reality? If so, to what extent?
What aspects of the neural activity convey reliable information
about the world? What aspects of the world are reliably conveyed?
To the extent that the neural response is not deterministically
related to impinging stimuli, how should we think about the other
determinants of our internal representation? These include noise
(uncertainty), filtering (selective representation),
context-dependence (relative vs. absolute information), and
top-down influences (expectations and goals). At a more
teleological level, how can we understand the design of sensory
codes in reference to the structure of natural signals and the
survival needs of organisms? In conclusion I will illustrate some
of the polydisciplinary experiments that I think are now needed
to advance the field of sensory physiology.
Speaker Bio
Pamela Reinagel is an Assistant Professor in the Neurobiology
Department at UCSD. She started her career in biochemistry and
classical genetics, studying at Carnegie Mellon (B.S.) and Harvard
University (Ph.D.), but always with active side interests in other
disciplines including mathematics, artificial neural networks,
cognitive psychology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and
visual arts. After completing her Ph.D. she fused these many
interests and switched fields to pursue research in Theoretical
Neuroscience. Dr. Reinagel's long term goal is to understand in broad
terms how information about the world becomes internally represented
at the level of primary sensory perception. Dr. Reinagel's
postdoctoral work was carried out in Markus Meister's lab at Harvard,
Christof Koch's lab and the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
at Caltech, and Clay Reid's lab at Harvard Medical School. She has
headed up her own laboratory at UCSD since 2003, where she employs a
combination of experiments (anatomy, electrophysiology, and visual
behavior), computation (data analysis, modelling), and theory to
understand visual coding and processing in the thalamus. She is a
recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, a Hellman Fellowship, and a Kavli
Award.
Main IGERT Symposium page
Last modified: Fri Jun 15 00:29:33 EDT 2007