April 6, 2022 - 4:15 pm
When artificial intelligence is tasked with visually identifying objects and faces, it assigns specific components of its network to face recognition — just like the human brain. Jennifer Michalowski | McGovern Institute for Brain Research The human brain seems to care a lot about faces. It’s dedicated a specific area to identifying them, and the neurons there are so good at their job that most of us can readily recognize thousands of...
Photo of Dr. Demis Hassabis, Founder and CEO of DeepMind
April 5, 2022 - 4:30 pm
Dr. Demis Hassabis, Founder and CEO of DeepMind
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 watch via live stream.
Abstract: The past decade has seen incredible advances in the field of Artificial...
March 29, 2022 - 4:15 pm
In a new study, intracranial electrodes helped reveal the cells in our brains and the neurological mechanisms responsible for memory creation. By Conor Feehly The successful formation of memories is an essential function in humans. Our memories provide us with data on past events and experiences which mandate how we behave in the here and now. Memories are also central to the formation of a concept of self, as the autobiographical nature of our...
fruit fly on a tree looking structure setup as an abicus
March 22, 2022 - 2:00 pm
Virtual (Zoom)
Alexander Borst, Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany
This talk will be fully remote via a Zoom Webinar.
Detecting the direction of image motion is important for visual navigation, predator avoidance and prey capture, and thus essential for the survival of all animals that have eyes. However, the direction of motion is not explicitly represented at...
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...
Photo by Matt Botsford @mattbotsford on Unsplash
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...
Photo of Prof. Petros Koumoutsakos, Harvard U.
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...
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....
Photo of Dr. Kohitij Kar (MIT)
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...
Photo of Prof. Winrich Freiwald (Rockefeller U.)
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...
Photo of Prof. Nancy Kanwisher
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...

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