Hans-Lukas Teuber Lecture: The Neural Circuitry of Sex and Violence
Description
Animals often have to make rapid decisions between different, competing behaviors, such as fighting, mating, or freezing. These decisions are controlled by sensory cues, the animal's internal state and its previous history. In humans, these innate behaviors are associated with emotion states such as fear, anger and love. We are studying the control of aggression vs. mating, in both mice and fruit flies, as a model for understanding how internal states, such as arousal or other so-called "emotion primitives," influence decisions between innate behaviors. This talk will focus on how aggression circuits are organized in the brain, and their relationship to circuits that control mating behavior. Our studies have revealed that mice and flies contain "modules" (relatively small groups of neurons) that control both aggression and mating, suggesting that this is an evolutionarily ancient circuit "motif." The role of these modules, and their relationship to decision-making and internal brain states, will be discussed. The long-term objective of these studies is to provide insights into the brain mechanisms that link emotion and decision-making, and their evolutionary origins.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Anderson is the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the Rockefeller University, where he trained with Nobel Laureate Guenter Blobel, and his postdoctoral training at Columbia University with Nobel Laureate Richard Axel. For the first 20 years of his career, Dr. Anderson’s research focused on the biology of neural stem cells and their role in brain development; he was the first to isolate a multipotential neural stem cell from the mammalian nervous system. Over the last 10 years, Dr. Anderson has switched his research focus to the study of neural circuits that control emotional behaviors in animal models. He has been at the forefront of developing and applying new technologies for neural circuit manipulation, such as optogenetics and pharmacogenetics, to the study of emotional behaviors such as fear, anxiety and aggression, in both mice and the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. His work in mice is currently focused on limbic circuits, including the amygdala and hypothalamus, and their role in aggression. Dr. Anderson’s awards include an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, Searle Scholars Award, the Charles Judson Herrick Award in Comparative Neurology and the Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.