The overarching interest of the Bear lab is in the question of how experience and deprivation modify synaptic connections in the brain. Experience-dependent synaptic plasticity is the physical substrate of memory, sculpts connections during postnatal development to determine the capabilities and limitations of brain functions, is responsible for the reorganization of the brain after damage, and is vulnerable in numerous psychiatric and neurological diseases and contributes to their symptoms.

The Boyden group, centered in the MIT Media Lab and jointly affiliated with the MIT Department of Biological Engineering and the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, works on inventing new tools for the analysis and engineering of brain circuits. We have been developing molecules, hardware, and methods to activate,silence, record, and analyze neural activity and circuit signaling, within and between brain circuits. We also work on novel, focal, noninvasive methods for human brain stimulation.

We use multiple approaches including traditional- and CRISPR-based genome editing, molecular, optogenetic, electrophysiological, and imaging techniques to understand 1) how olfactory stimuli are transformed to behavioral outputs as function of learning and 2) how the immune system modulates neural circuits to shape and guide behavioral outputs.

The development of the vertebrate brain involves a phase of synaptogenesis during which the activity patterns of young neurons mediate a competition that allows only highly effective synapses to survive. These activity-dependent developmental events are responsible for many of the adaptive changes in brain wiring as children mature and it is also likely to be responsible for some of the devastating and permanent behavioral effects of genetically or environmentally caused disruptions in normal early brain activity. The Constantine - Patton laboratory investigates the mechanisms involved in this developmental synaptic plasticity. Specifically, we are trying to dissect the signaling cascades through which synaptic activity determines which young synapses will be withdrawn and which ones will be retained to mediate adult brain function.

The research goal of the DiCarlo laboratory is to understand the mechanisms underlying visual object recognition. Specifically, we seek to understand how sensory input is transformed by the brain from an initial representation (essentially a photograph on the retina), to a new, remarkably powerful form of representation -- one that can support our seemingly effortless ability to solve the computationally difficult problem of object recognition. 

Synapses are fundamental units of neuronal connectivity in the brain. It is at these specialized cell junctions that neurons communicate with one another. Many neuroscientists now look to the synapse for principles of learning and memory, for processes underlying behavior, and for pathological mechanisms of various neurological and psychiatric disorders. The Feng lab's long-term goal is to understand the mechanisms regulating the development and function of synapses and to probe the roles of synaptic and circuitry dysfunction in certain abnormal behaviors and their relevance to psychiatric disorders. There are currently three major aspects of research in the lab.

The goal of the Gabrieli lab is to understand principles of brain organization that are consistent across individuals and those that vary across people due to age, personality, and other dimensions of individuality. Therefore, we examine brain-behavior relations across the life span, from children through the elderly. Our primary methods are brain imaging (functional and structural), and the experimental behavioral study of patients with brain injuries. The majority of our studies involve functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but we also employ other brain measures as needed to address scientific questions, including electroencephalography (EEG).

The same brain that can construct language, music and mathematics also lets us develop habits of thought and action. These semi-automatic routines free us to think and attend to the world. But the habit system can also be hijacked by disease and drug exposure. The Graybiel Laboratory focuses on the habit system of the brain and our remarkable ability to switch from conscious activity to nearly non-conscious behavior. The goal of this research is to understand how we make and break habits and how the neurobiology of the habit system is helping to advance understanding of human problems ranging from Parkinson’s disease to obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders and addiction.

Dr. Heiman’s work seeks to understand the cell type-specific mechanisms responsible for neuronal vulnerability in aging and neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington’s disease. 

The Hockfield laboratory has studied molecular substrates of mammalian development. We identified a family of glycovariants of the extracellular matrix (ECM) proteoglycan, aggrecan, whose expression is regulated by neuronal activity early in an animal's life. Expression of the aggrecan glycoforms is regulated in parallel with critical period events and may play a role in stabilizing mature synaptic relationships. A related ECM protein, BEHAB/brevican, is expressed when glial cells travel during development and after brain injury. BEHAB/brevican is also expressed at very high levels in brain tumors, and can mediate the motility of tumor cells. A key feature of our work has been to bring biochemical and molecular biological techniques to the classical anatomical analysis of mammalian CNS development.

H. Robert Horvitz has devoted much of his career to studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Only 1 mm long and containing fewer than 1000 cells, C. elegans has proved to be remarkably informative for studying many biological problems, including the genetic control of development and behavior and the mechanisms that underlie neurodegenerative disease.

When we think of behavior, we think of neural code, and when we think of neurons and neuronal networks, we think of neural dynamics. The link between brain and behavior thus resides at the intersection between the neural code and neural dynamics. The long-term objective of research in my lab is to understand (1) how neurons and neural circuits generate and control dynamic patterns of activity, and (2) how those patterns encode behaviorally relevant information. 

We tackle these question by performing experiments on animals trained to perform a wide array of cognitive tasks that require anticipation, integration, coordination, and timing – functions that depend on the brain’s internally-generated dynamics. We combine psychophysics, electrophysiology, optogenetics, machine learning, and computational modeling to uncover the mechanisms that shape neural dynamics, and the principles that put those dynamics to use in the control of behavior.

Roger Levy asks theoretical and applied questions about the processing and acquisition of natural language, with a focus on how linguistic communication resolves uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings.

The computational power of the brain depends on synaptic connections that link together billions of neurons. The focus of the Littleton laboratory's work is to understand the mechanisms by which neurons form synaptic connections, how synapses transmit information, and how synapses change during learning and memory. To complement this basic research in neuroscience, we also study how alterations in neuronal signaling underlie several neurological diseases, including epilepsy, autism and Huntington’s Disease. We combine molecular biology, protein biochemistry, electrophysiology, and imaging approaches with Drosophila genetics to address these questions.

The Miller Laboratory uses experimental and theoretical approaches to study the neural basis of cognition. We investigate how categories, concepts, and rules are learned, mental flexibility, how attention is focused, and, more generally, how the brain coordinates goal-directed thought and action.

The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) aims to create a new field — the Science and Engineering of Intelligence — by bringing together computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists to work in close collaboration. This new field is dedicated to developing a computationally based understanding of human intelligence and establishing an engineering practice based on that understanding.

The Prelec lab studies the psychology and neuroscience of decision-making, favoring problems that involve risky choice, time discounting, self-control and consumer behavior. They also have a longstanding interest in non-verifiable subjective judgments, specifically, in developing methods for eliciting such judgments and for assessing their quality and credibility. Non-verifiable judgments include forecasts of the remote future, historical conjectures, counterfactual hypotheses, and phenomenological 'first-person' reports of internal states.

We live in a three-dimensional world, but each of our eyes only receives a two-dimensional image. How does our brain combine these images? 

The Saxe lab studies Theory of Mind as a case study in the deeper and broader question: how does the brain - an electrical and biological machine - construct abstract thoughts? We use functional neuroimaging, behavioural studies with kids and adults, patient studies, and transcranial magnetic stimulation to study abstract representations in the human brain. In addition to Theory of Mind, our recent research investigates brain development, moral reasoning, causal reasoning, and language. We are interested in students or post-docs with backgrounds in philosophy, computer science, or systems neuroscience, in addition to psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Current research in the Schneider lab involves axon regeneration in the central nervous system with functional recovery; special topics in human neuropsychology and perception; studies of the brains of sea mammals.

Using a combination of experimental and computational modeling techniques, research in the Sinha laboratory focuses on understanding how the human brain learns to recognize objects through visual experience and how objects are encoded in memory. The lab's experimental work on these issues involves studying healthy individuals and also those with neurological disorders such as autism. A key initiative of the lab is Project Prakash; this effort seeks to accomplish the twin goals of providing treatment to children with disabilities and also understanding mechanisms of learning and plasticity in the brain.

The Sur laboratory studies the development, plasticity and dynamics of circuits in the cerebral cortex of the brain. The laboratory’s goal is to discover fundamental mechanisms of brain wiring and processing, and how they go awry in brain disorders.

The main research interest in the Tonegawa laboratory is to decipher brain mechanisms subserving learning and memory. We seek to understand what happens in the brain when a memory is formed, when a fragile short-term memory is consolidated to a solid long-term memory, and when a memory formed previously is recalled on subsequent occasions. We also seek to understand the role of memory in decision-making, and how various external or internal factors, such as reward, punishment, attention and the subject’s emotional state, affect learning and memory. In summary, we study how the central nervous system in the brain enables our mind, with a focus on learning and memory.

The Tye Lab employs a multi-disciplinary approach including optogenetic, in vivo and ex vivo electrophysiological, pharmacological and imaging techniques to find mechanistic explanations for how emotional and motivational states influence behavior, in health and disease.

The Wexler ab/Normal Language Lab seeks to understand the nature of the computational system of human language in its many guises. We study most aspects of linguistic structure, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics and morphology. In pursuing these goals, we take as our primary linguistic data abnormal language, by which we mean nothing more than any system of language that seems to differ from standard adult language for biological reasons, including lack of maturation, difficulties in learning, and genetic variation.

The goal of the Wurtman laboratory is to discover safe and effective treatments for brain diseases. Over the years, we have used a common basic strategy for doing so:

• Doing fundamental research to identify a previously unsuspected control mechanism involving brain chemistry
• Confirming that this newly discovered mechanism is at work in the human brain
• Identifying a disease in which this mechanism goes awry
• Developing and testing potential treatments based on these discoveries