Wellcome Trust has given a prestigious Discovery Award to fund research on fundamental mechanisms of learning in cortical neurons. It was awarded to an interdisciplinary team led by Professor Rafal Bogacz from the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit, working together with co-applicants: Professor Andrew King from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Professor Colin Akerman from the Department of Pharmacology, and Professor Claudia Clopath from Imperial College.
This award will combine computational and experimental methods to investigate mechanisms of learning in cortical neurons and networks. Specifically, the team will test a radical new idea about how error-based learning happens in the brain, namely that this is driven by plasticity arising from differences in activity between the dendrites and cell bodies of individual neurons.
This research aims to identify fundamental rules of plasticity that can be formalised mathematically and tested experimentally. It will involve close integration of computational modelling by Rafal Bogacz and Claudia Clopath with investigation of cellular plasticity mechanisms in vitro in Colin Akerman’s lab and of auditory learning in vivo in Andrew King’s lab.
Rafal Bogacz comments:
I am very excited about this research, because it combines insights from different fields to addresses the key question in neuroscience of how learning in large cortical networks emerges from interactions among basic building blocks of neural systems.