“Our long-term goal is to build good predictive models of the auditory system,” McDermott says. “If we were successful in that goal, then it would really transform our ability to make people hear better, because we could design a computer program to figure out what to do to incoming sound to make it easier to recognize what somebody said or where a sound is coming from.”

Kosakowski's current work in Rebecca Saxe's lab uses fMRI to focus on how the brains of babies just two to nine months old respond to short videos of faces or bodies—and how that differs from their response to scenes without people. Heather, holding the baby in the photo above, is the first to find evidence of this kind of specialization in children under five years old. Via MIT Technology Review.

Lawrence Udeigwe, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Manhattan College, joins BCS for 2021-22 as an MIT Martin Luther King Visiting Associate Professor. Working with Professor Jim DiCarlo, Udeigwe will use analytical and numerical methods to explore and model the dynamical interactions between synaptic plasticity and a set of accompanying biologically stabilizing mechanisms known as homeostatic plasticity.