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As some of you know, I recently got back into the research world, and in particular I work in Eric Yttris' lab at Carnegie Mellon University.



Eric's lab studies the relationship between various kinds of behaviors and the neural activity in a few areas known to be involved in enacting and shaping those behaviors, namely the motor cortex and basal ganglia.  And study that, he uses tools like optogentics, neuronal recordings, and stimulations, while mice perform certain tasks, or, in my case, while they freely behave wandering around an enclosed space.



We talk about how Eric got here, how and why the motor cortex and basal ganglia are still mysteries despite lots of theories and experimental work, Eric's work on trying to solve those mysteries using both trained tasks and more naturalistic behavior. We talk about the valid question, "What is a behavior?", and lots more.



Yttri Lab




Twitter: @YttriLab



Related papers

Opponent and bidirectional control of movement velocity in the basal ganglia.



B-SOiD, an open-source unsupervised algorithm for identification and fast prediction of behaviors.






0:00 - Intro
2:36 - Eric's background
14:47 - Different animal models
17:59 - ANNs as models for animal brains
24:34 - Main question
25:43 - How circuits produce appropriate behaviors
26:10 - Cerebellum
27:49 - What do motor cortex and basal ganglia do?
49:12 - Neuroethology
1:06:09 - What is a behavior?
1:11:18 - Categorize behavior (B-SOiD)
1:22:01 - Real behavior vs. ANNs
1:33:09 - Best era in neuroscience