Our mission is to transform mental health by understanding how the sensory world steers the mind.
We learn through trial and error to respond to sensory cues.
Some sensory cues, we learn to ignore.
Our lab studies how sensory cues become linked to adaptive or maladaptive responses through learning.
Adaptive responses are necessary to develop, survive and thrive; maladaptive responses contribute to disorders across the lifespan. We study this learning process in the auditory and visual systems, as well as in the sensory-recipient regions of the basal ganglia. Our work is structured around three major aims:
We investigate the circuit-level mechanisms that coordinate trial-and-error learning with memory recall.
In vivo
In vitro
Physiology
We study how connections between the sensory cortex and the basal ganglia change to support learning.
Respond to cue
… or error
Behavior and Cell Biology
We manipulate brain activity to a) reinforce helpful cue-response links or b) enable ignoring of unhelpful cues.
Multiplexed
optogenetics
Optogenetic
cue
Optogenetic Brain Control
Recent projects
(in collaboration with the Sabatini and Scanziani labs)
Can We Trace the Neural Pathway From Cue to Response?
A single external sensory cue can activate many overlapping and diverging pathways across the brain, making it difficult to trace how behavior emerges. To cut through this complexity, we’ve developed an innovative approach: we train mice to respond to a synthetic cue—optogenetic activation of neurons in the sensory cortex. In essence, we’re “playing” a sensory cue directly into the brain using light. This strategy bypasses some of the brain’s complexity, allowing us to trace the flow of activity through neural pathways with unprecedented clarity. Remarkably, the mice learn to respond to this synthetic cue as if it were a real sensation. This powerful approach enables our lab to precisely probe the cue-to-response pathway and uncover how neural circuits and synapses change as learning unfolds.
Can We Manipulate the Brain to Accelerate Learning?
We’ve discovered that neural activity in a specific region of the basal ganglia is essential for learning to respond to different sensory cues. When we shut off activity in this region, learning stops. Now, we’re working to flip that effect: can we speed up learning by sculpting the neural activity in this region? By manipulating brain circuits, we aim to uncover how the brain builds associations—and how we might accelerate that process.
How Does the Brain Ignore the Sensory World?
We’ve studied how internal state (i.e., alert to the world versus “daydreaming”) affects sensory processing. We found that feedback projections from the cortex to the thalamus are a critical mechanism to enhance or suppress the flow of sensory information into the brain. When we daydream, this feedback mechanism disrupts sensory processing and shifts the brain toward a representation of internal processes such as expectation, imagery and working memory.
Attentive
Daydreaming
