The Fall 2021 Brains, Minds, and Machines (BMM) Seminar Series will be hosted in a hybrid format.  Please see the information included below regarding attending the event either in-person or remotely via Zoom connection

Abstract:  Songbird vocalizations are produced by a sparse sequence of spike bursts in a motor circuit that controls the vocal output on a fast (10ms) timescale. This sparse sequence is also transmitted to song learning circuits, presumably to control the temporal specificity of vocal learning, a process thought to proceed by mechanisms similar to reinforcement learning (RL). Electrophysiological recordings in young birds have revealed that such sequences do not exist at the earliest stages of learning, and emerge only gradually during song acquisition. How does this sparse temporal basis, or state space, emerge during development?  Songbirds learn their vocalizations by imitating the song of an adult bird, suggesting that the auditory memory of the tutor song may play a role in setting up sequences in the motor system, creating a state space custom built for a given tutor song.  I will describe a model for how temporal sequences to support RL of this complex behavioral pattern may be constructed in the brain, and will propose a hypothesis for how the auditory system could shape these sequences to align with a memory of the tutor song, thus facilitating song evaluation.​

Speaker bio.:  Michale Fee joined the McGovern Institute in 2003 and is currently the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He received his PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1992. Before moving to MIT, he was a principal investigator in the Biological Computation Research Department at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

Michale Fee studies how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors, focusing on the songbird as a model system. Birdsong is a complex behavior that young birds learn from their fathers and it provides an ideal system to study the neural basis of learned behavior. Because the parts of the bird’s brain that control song learning are closely related to human circuits that are disrupted in brain disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, Fee hopes the lessons learned from birdsong will provide new clues to the causes and possible treatment of these conditions.

Link to attend talk remotely via Zoom:

Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/93976178761?pwd=TFVPV2ZTNGk0K1hxYVNUTWFJSngyUT09

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MIT attendees:
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Non-MIT attendees:

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