Our next Brain Bag will be this coming Monday March 14th, at 6PM in the Mellon Institute Social Room. Xiao Zhou will be presenting a talk titled "Distinct timescales of functional reorganization in a long-term skill learning task". Morgan Thompson will be presenting on "Exploratory Experimentation in Neuroscience: The Gendered Connectome". With such diverse topics, this Brain Bag will interest folks across the CNBC!

Xiao Zhou

Distinct timescales of functional reorganization in a long-term
skill learning task

Skill learning is associated with a functional reorganization of
cortical neural activity. However, the link between changes in neural
activity and the concurrent behavioral improvements is not well
understood. This is primarily because in most tasks it is difficult to
interpret the behavioral impact of particular changes in neural activity.
Here we leveraged a brain-computer interface (BCI) learning paradigm to
determine how long-term practice (several weeks) leads to skill
acquisition in a BCI movement task. In a BCI, the experimenter provides
the subject a definitive mapping between neural activity and the movement
of an effector (in our case, a computer cursor). Each new BCI mapping thus
provides the subject a new tool that must be mastered through continued
practice. One advantage of this paradigm is that the mappings of
individual neurons to cursor movement can be manipulated to test the
specificity of adaptive responses. We found two distinct timescales of
functional cortical reorganization during long-term learning of the new
BCI mapping. In the first phase, rapid, coordinated changes in activity
across all neurons act to quickly (within one day) reduce behavioral
errors during task performance. In the second phase, long-timescale
changes in the tuning of individual neurons act to gradually improve the
efficiency of the movement over weeks of practice.

Morgan Thompson

Exploratory Experimentation in Neuroscience: The Gendered Connectome

I argue that distinctions from philosophy of experimentation should enter the debate about the existence and extent of sex/gender differences in the brain, and in particular, the connectome—macroscale network models of human brain organization. Sex/gender connectome studies often have features associated with exploratory experiments: use of wide (or high-throughput) instruments, large data sets, lack of local guiding theory (or hypotheses), and the goal of discovery of empirical regularities. I consider cases of impoverished exploratory experiments and of more sophisticated exploratory experiments of the “gendered connectome”. I will conclude with some ways in which analysis of exploratory experimentation within philosophy of experiment can suggest improvements for future studies of gender differences in the brain.