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Caltech Media RelationsCaltech Today
2008
Caltech Scientists Decipher the Neurological Basis of Timely Movement Work by Dr. Richard A. Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech, and his colleagues Grant Mulliken of MIT and Sam Musallam of McGill University, offers the first neural evidence that voluntary limb movements are guided by our brain's prediction of what will happen an instant into the future. Read More... 06-09-2008
Caltech Researchers Reveal the Neuronal Computations Governing Strategic Social Interactions in the Human Brain In a strategic game, the success of any player depends not just on his or her own actions, but on the behavior of every other player in the game. To be successful, players must not only pay attention to what other players do, but also how they are thinking. Understanding how the brain functions during this strategizing is at "the core of studies of adaptive social intelligence," says John P. O'Doherty of the California Institute of Technology and the subject of a recent series of brain studies by O'Doherty and his colleagues that offer new insight into how the brain works in social situations. Read more... 05-19-2008
Sight Recovery After Blindness Offers New Insights on Brain Reorganization Studies of the brains of blind persons whose sight was partially restored later in life have produced a compelling example of the brain's ability to adapt to new circumstances and rewire and reconfigure itself. The research, conducted by postdoctoral researcher Melissa Saenz of the California Institute of Technology along with Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems, and their colleagues, shows that the part of the brain that processes visual information in normal individuals can be co-opted to respond to both visual and auditory information. That brain reorganization persists even if the blind subjects later regain their vision—for example, through technologies such as corneal stem-cell transplants, retinal prosthetics, and gene therapy. Read more... 05-15-2008
How Fairness Is Wired in the Brain Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions. "The fact that the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity," notes Steven Quartz, an associate professor of philosophy at Caltech and author of the study, voicing a sentiment that anyone who has seen children fight over a treat can relate to. Read more... 05-08-2008
Two Faculty Members Join American Academy of Arts and Sciences Caltech professors Michael Dickinson and Thomas Palfrey are among the 190 new fellows elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year. They join an assembly that was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholars to provide practical solutions to pressing issues. Read more... 04-30-2008
Locating a "Free Choice" Brain Circuit Your brain gets a better workout when you change your routine. Richard Andersen, Bijan Pesaran, a former Caltech postdoc, and Matthew Nelson, a Caltech graduate student in CNS, pinpointed one particular circuit that activates your ability to execute a decision. Read more... 04-16-2008
Athanassios Siapas, Assistant Professor of Computation and Neural Systems, and his postdoctoral researcher Evgueniy Lubenov are revealing the mechanism by which the brain spontaneously tips itself toward a state balanced between order and chaos. The driving factor in the brain's self-regulation, they say, is the timing of neural pulses. Read more... 04-14-2008
Using a flight simulator, Michael Dickinson, the Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, and postdoctoral students Gaby Maimon and Andrew Straw, have come closer to understanding what guides the decision making of the common fruit fly as it zips through space. Their experiments were conducted on both free-flying flies and on flies tethered within a virtual-reality flight simulator. In the flight simulator, flies could steer toward or away from images displayed on an electronic panorama. "We can present the fly with different scenes and the fly reacts to them, like a 12-year-old boy playing a video game," says Dickinson. Read more... 03-25-08
Christof Koch, the Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and Professor of Computation and Neural Systems, and his colleagues, have found that changes in pupil diameter correspond to the moment when a simple decision is made. The pupil, which is about 2 mm wide in bright light, dilated by as much as 1 mm at that moment—a change that, in theory, could be noticeable to a casual observer. Read more... 02-12-2008
Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception Antonio Rangel, Associate Professor of Economics, and colleagues found that changes in the stated price of a sampled wine influenced not only how good volunteers thought it tasted, but the activity of a brain region that is involved in our experience of pleasure. View press release... 01-14-2008
