Fan Wang

Investigator of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research

Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Host(s): Erica Rodriguez (Postdoc), Daniel Salzman (Faculty) 

Pain, emotion and body schema

My talk will cover two different topics with largely unpublished studies. The first one focuses on pain. I will describe our recent studies that used quantitative measures of autonomic responses to understand the emotional aspect of pain, our findings of brain regions that alter pain perception through modulating autonomic responses, and how anticipatory autonomic responses can produce nocebo pain. The second topic is on cortical substrates of body schema and action awareness. I will describe our studies using large-scale in vivo recording with concurrent 3D tracking of full body joint angles. We discover the existence of two parallel coding schemes in the proprioceptive and posterior parietal cortex in the mouse: a subset of neurons encodes body's 3D configurations while other neurons form action-specific ensembles with all phases of an action encoded by different neurons within the ensemble.

Relevant Publications:

General anesthetics activate a potent central pain-suppression circuit in the amygdala

General anesthesia activates a central anxiolytic center in the BNST

Venue Information:

Speaker Location: Jerome L. Greene Science Center, Kavli Auditorium, 9th Floor Lecture Hall

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminars have been organized to help build community and collaboration among researchers interested in this broad field across campus. The in-person activities, including the talks, provide meaningful interactions for the speakers, many of whom have traveled a long way to visit Columbia. However, if you are a Columbia researcher on another campus and are unable to attend the talk at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, please email [email protected] at least 48 hours in advance to request an individual, one-time Zoom link (livestream only, no Q&A). 

If you have a short- or long-term accommodation request (medical issue, travel, other concerns, etc.), or any other questions, please also reach out to [email protected].

Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. 

More information and a full schedule can be found here.