By high school, Buonomano knew he wanted to study neuroscience. I realized then that I should stop calling her that, but also that she didn’t know any better, and that it’s individual patterns and environment that help us make sense of who we are.” After reading a Scientific American article about rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, Buonomano says, he would wait for his sister to fall asleep and then open her eyelids to see if her eyes were indeed moving back and forth. I saw my sister go from a baby that’s vulnerable and helpless to a child making sense of the buzzing, sometimes confusing sensory world we live in.”īuonomano’s sibling became his first experimental subject: “I did little experiments on my sister, which made me appreciate how amazing the brain really is.” He lovingly called her “dummy.” “One day I was out front playing with my friends, and someone called someone else a dummy, and she came running out and asked who called her. “One of my initial interests in neurobiology was a result of my big-brother experience, of witnessing a young brain develop. His younger sister was born two years later. His father, a physicist and mathematician, had accepted a faculty position at the State University of Campinas. Buonomano was born in Providence, Rhode Island, lived in Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, and then, when he was seven, moved with his parents to São Paulo, Brazil. Here, Buonomano describes how he performed his first experiments on his little sister, bathed mice with antidandruff shampoo, and hypothesized that timing is so integral to brain function that all of our brain’s circuits keep tabs on the clock. Today, Buonomano’s laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses computational modeling, in vitro electrophysiology, and human psychophysics experiments to explore how neurons and the brain as a whole perceive and respond to time. “Over the past 10 years, the field has definitely embraced the intrinsic model-that all of the circuits in the brain can tell time- more and more, and that’s been a really rewarding process to participate in.” “Mauk had this very influential notion that time is encoded in the changing patterns of neuronal activity.” “My collaboration with him was absolutely formative for me,” says Buonomano. Such networks also have the ability to tune the timing of their responses, the two found. Mauk and Buonomano modeled the way the cerebellum’s circuits could respond to stimuli and showed that this type of neuronal network can differentiate between time intervals that differ by just tens of milliseconds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |