Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Samuel Sober, Associate Professor of Biology, Co-Director, Simons-Emory International Consortium on Motor Control

"The Songbird and the Mouse: The Neuroscience of Skilled Behavior”

Humans and animals excel at learning complex behavioral skills. During learning, the brain collects information from the senses to detect errors in behavior and uses this information to rewire itself to improve future performance – a process of “sensorimotor learning” that underlies crucial behaviors such as speaking, walking, and tool use. However, our understanding of how the brain accomplishes such feats of dexterity remains rudimentary due to a lack of tools to measure brain activity and scientific frameworks to understand the complexity of the resulting data. Samuel Sober will discuss the work he and his fellow researchers are doing (in a consortium of eight groups from three countries) that combines neurobiology, mathematics, and technology development to understand how the brain controls skilled behaviors as diverse as birdsong and mammalian locomotion—manifest, indeed, all cross the tree of life.