![]() Jones, throughout four years, only amassed 2,100 receiving yards with 15 receiving touchdowns in his short-lived and disappointing career in Jacksonville. It was simply too big of a draft year for the Jaguars to miss on their pick, right? Perhaps what made his welcome in Jacksonville not-quite-so-welcoming is that VP of Player Personnel James Harris (who pulled the trigger on the Jones' selection) took the Arkansas alum over future stars such as Aaron Rodgers, Jason Campbell, Roddy White and Lofa Tatupu, just to name a few. We have enjoyed successful collaborations with a number of industrial partners over the years, in particular with the Lilly Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience.Jaguars fans did not easily embrace the selection of Jones in the first round in 2005, most likely because he had never worked as a receiver in college, and at a time when the Jaguars were so desperate to make a splash in the offseason, taking an unproven receiver in Jones only amounted to more questions being asked about the team's direction. Almost all projects in the lab draw on local, national and international collaborations across all these disciplines – it’s the only way to join all the dots of modern neuroscience. We are a group of postdocs and graduate students (in roughly equal numbers) with a range of backgrounds spanning biochemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, maths, medicine, pharmacology and psychology. We have recently started to use data recorded from rodent brains to help interpret human scalp EEG data recorded from healthy volunteers (recruited from ) or patients (in collaboration with Dara Manoach at MGH and Marianne van den Bree at Cardiff University). Julia’s Advances in Genetics review explains how we might investigate mechanisms using rodent models (Heckenast et al. Rodent models also allow us to use optogenetics to map or silence specific connections in these circuits, or to model genetic (see Jon’s 2015 Nature Neuroscience paper on Down Syndrome, summarised here ) or neurodevelopmental disruption (see Keith and Ullrich’s 2012 Neuron paper, summarised here ) associated with disease. In order to monitor brain activity directly and simultaneously from multiple brain regions in rodents, we implant arrays of recording electrodes into brain regions that act as core nodes during processing of memory, decision-making and aversive or rewarding information: the hippocampus, prefrontal and parietal cortex, amygdala and nucleus accumbens. ![]() We use a combination of rat or mouse models, human volunteers and patients. Ullrich explains some of our interests in schizophrenia here ![]() Of course, we are ultimately interested in establishing how and why distributed information processing becomes impaired, including in anxiety, schizophrenia, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and Down Syndrome. You can hear Matt talk about sleep here and here 2016 for a Cell Reports paper relating sleep to synaptic plasticity). 2014 for a review in EJN and Sadowski et al. Alongside tracking brain activity during behaviour, we are particularly interested in the roles of brain activity during sleep, which is central to fine-tuning and integrating memories (see Gardner et al. We study how neurons distributed across functionally specialised brain regions share information over the course of experience to guide decisions. How does my brain make this happen? How are the different facets of my experience – its location, sensory properties and emotional consequences – integrated into memory? Are the same neurons that were first activated when I hit the murky water still involved in storing and recalling that memory years later? How has the impact of this pond on my brain informed my behaviour ever since? It so happens that the offending pond is about 150 metres from my Bristol lab and, whenever I see it, I can immediately recall the traumatic scenes of my youth. Decades ago, I fell into a pond full of mud and slime.
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