Tom Clandinin
The Shooter Family Professor, Department of Neurobiology
Stanford University
Host(s): Gwyneth Card (Faculty) and Yixin Zang (Postdoc)
How does the brain decide which way to turn?
The ability to act voluntarily is fundamental to animal behavior. For example, self-directed movements are critical to exploration, particularly in the absence of external sensory signals that could shape a trajectory. However, how neural networks might plan future changes in direction in the absence of salient sensory cues is unknown. Here we use volumetric two-photon imaging to map neural activity associated with walking across the entire brain of the fruit fly Drosophila, register these signals across animals with micron precision, and reveal that turning is associated with widespread asymmetric activity between brain hemispheres. Strikingly, this asymmetry in interhemispheric dynamics emerges more than 10 seconds before a turn within a specific brain region associated with motor control, the Inferior Posterior Slope (IPS). This early, local difference in neural activity predicts the direction of future turns on a trial-by-trial basis, revealing long term motor planning. As the direction of each turn is neither trained, nor guided by external sensory cues, it must be internally determined. We therefore propose that this pre-motor center contains a bistable circuit that stochastically biases a future movement direction.
Relevant Publications:
Mapping the neural dynamics of locomotion across the Drosophila brain
Neural correlates of future volitional action in Drosophila
Venue Information:
Speaker Location: Jerome L. Greene Science Center, Kavli Auditorium, 9th Floor Lecture Hall
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