March 7, 2022 - 2:45 pm
Study identifies brain cells that form boundaries between discrete events
Researchers have identified two types of cells in our brains that are involved in organizing discrete memories based on when they occurred. This finding improves our understanding of how the human brain forms memories and could have implications in memory disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health's Brain Research...
March 2, 2022 - 5:15 pm
Researchers find similarities between how some computer-vision systems process images and how humans see out of the corners of our eyes.
Adam Zewe | MIT News Office
Perhaps computer vision and human vision have more in common than meets the eye?
Research from MIT suggests that a certain type of robust computer-vision model perceives visual representations similarly to the way humans do using peripheral vision. These models, known as...
February 25, 2022 - 12:00 pm
by Margaret Osborne
Excerpt: "Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that a specific set of neurons located in the auditory cortex in the brain respond to singing but not other sounds like speaking or instrumental music.
“This work suggests there’s a distinction in the brain between instrumental music and vocal music,” says study author Sam Norman-Haignere, who was formerly an MIT researcher and is now a...
February 23, 2022 - 10:15 am
New data shows that brain regions in infants just a few months old are specialized for faces, bodies, or scenes.
By Anne Trafton
Within the visual cortex of the adult brain, as MIT neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher discovered years ago, a small region is specialized to respond to faces, while nearby regions show strong preferences for bodies or for scenes such as landscapes. It’s long been thought that it takes years of visual experience for...
February 22, 2022 - 4:00 pm
Prof. Petros Koumoutsakos, Harvard University
The Spring 2022 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
Please note, MIT is requiring that all attendees, including MIT COVIDpass...
Please note, MIT is requiring that all attendees, including MIT COVIDpass...
February 22, 2022 - 10:15 am
MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that respond to singing but not other types of music.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that lights up when we hear singing, but not other types of music.
These neurons, found in the auditory cortex, appear to respond to the specific combination of voice and music, but not...
February 21, 2022 - 9:45 am
A model’s ability to generalize is influenced by both the diversity of the data and the way the model is trained, researchers report.
Adam Zewe | MIT News Office
Artificial intelligence systems may be able to complete tasks quickly, but that doesn’t mean they always do so fairly. If the datasets used to train machine-learning models contain biased data, it is likely the system could exhibit that same bias when it makes decisions in practice....
February 15, 2022 - 4:00 pm
Dr. Kohitij Kar, DiCarlo Lab, MIT
The Spring 2022 CBMM Research Meetings 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
Please note, MIT is requiring that all attendees, including MIT COVIDpass users, sign-in to the event...
Please note, MIT is requiring that all attendees, including MIT COVIDpass users, sign-in to the event...
February 1, 2022 - 4:00 pm
This seminar talk will be hosted remotely via Zoom.
Prof. Winrich Freiwald, Rockefeller U.
POSTPONED: This seminar talk is postponed and will be rescheduled for a later date in Spring 2022. We will post the new talk details as soon as we finalize the new date.
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Please note, this talk will be held remotely via Zoom.
Speaker bio: Dr. Freiwald, a native of Oldenburg, Germany, performed...
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Please note, this talk will be held remotely via Zoom.
Speaker bio: Dr. Freiwald, a native of Oldenburg, Germany, performed...
January 31, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Professor and cognitive neuroscientist recognized for groundbreaking work on the functional organization of the human brain.
by Julie Pryor | McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT News
Excerpt: The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has announced that Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has received the 2022 NAS Award in the Neurosciences for...
January 31, 2022 - 10:45 am
[Foreword by CBMM's Mandana Sassanfar]
Taylor Baum first became involved with CBMM when she was selected to participate in the 2017 CBMM Undergraduate Summer Research Internships in Neuroscience. Taylor was invited to return to MIT as an undergraduate visiting student and continue her research project in Prof. Emery Brown's lab in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Dept. (MIT BCS.) In 2019, Taylor was accepted into the extremely competitive MIT...
January 27, 2022 - 11:15 am
MIT neuroscientists have developed a computer model that can answer that question as well as the human brain.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
The human brain is finely tuned not only to recognize particular sounds, but also to determine which direction they came from. By comparing differences in sounds that reach the right and left ear, the brain can estimate the location of a barking dog, wailing fire engine, or approaching car.
MIT...
January 20, 2022 - 1:45 pm
Sharing food and kissing are among the signals babies use to interpret their social world, according to a new study.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them.
MIT neuroscientists have now identified a specific signal that young children and even babies use to...
January 20, 2022 - 11:15 am
Even before they can talk, young babies know that two people must have a close relationship if they're willing to do to anything that involves swapping saliva.
Kissing on the mouth, sharing a spoon, taking licks off of someone's ice-cream cone — all of these activities generally only happen when people have an especially intimate relationship, and this fact appears to be obvious to infants who are only 8 to 10 months old, according to a new...
January 11, 2022 - 8:45 am
Nature Methods has named protein structure prediction the Method of the Year 2021.
If the Earth moves for you, among other reasons, the causes can be geologic or romantic. In science, in the context of predicting protein structure, you might have felt the ground tremble in late 2020 as you perused the results of the 14th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP). In this competition, scientists regularly test the prowess of...