NEW YORK, NY — “Human beings are fundamentally a social species,” said Columbia psychologist Kevin Ochsner, PhD, who researches how our brains help us understand other people. “Everything we do is fundamentally in relation to one another.”
Dr. Ochsner didn’t need to convince his fellow speakers: Columbia scientists who are investigating the roots of social wiring in the brain. Along with Dr. Ochsner, they had gathered to share their research to a packed auditorium of undergraduates, graduate students, trainees and professors at the Zuckerman Institute’s inaugural Local Circuits Affiliates Symposium on October 29. The symposium featured the Institute’s faculty and affiliate faculty, and brought together scientists and students from across Columbia to learn from different points of view on neuroscience.
Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, PhD, a neurobiologist in Biological Sciences and a Zuckerman Institute principal investigator, was there, discussing his lab’s research into how the sensation of touch can help humans and diverse animals connect with others. So was Zuckerman Principal Investigator Andrés Bendesky, PhD, also a neuroscientist in Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Sciences, talking about how genes and brain circuits linked with aggression have evolved in the Siamese fighting fish.
Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discussed the neuroscience underlying the sensation of touch. (Credit: Steve Myaskovsky for Columbia.)
The audience also heard from Kevin Bath, PhD, in Psychiatry at Columbia’s Irving Medical Center, whose lab explores what impact adverse experiences early in life have on the development of social abilities and other skills, and Meghan Meyer, PhD, in Psychology, who spoke about how deviating from common views might be linked with loneliness.
Katherine Keyes, PhD, MPH, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, emphasized that when it came to the neuroscience of social connections, whether or not researchers could apply their research findings broadly depended very strongly on how representative the sample of participants was of the general population. She and her colleagues showed that one brain imaging study included disappropriate numbers of children from highly educated parents, biasing the results.
“The topic of the symposium, ‘The Neuroscience of Social Connections,’ was so fitting for this first Affiliate Faculty symposium because it seeded new social and scientific connections among us,” said Carol Mason, PhD, chair of interschool planning at the Zuckerman Institute and leader of the Affiliate Faculty program.
Another highlight of the day was a data blitz from doctoral students and postdocs from across Columbia.
"I spend a lot of time with students," said Katrina Armstrong, MD, interim president of Columbia University and chief executive officer of Columbia University Irving Medical Center. "Mostly what I hear from them is that they are a generation that has such an opportunity to have an impact. And I hear that we as a university, we as a faculty, we as an administration, have an extraordinary responsibility to enable that impact."
Participants at the inaugural Local Circuits Affiliates Symposium at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute (left to right): Meghan Meyer, Jonathan Kasdin, Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, Carol Mason, Andrés Bendesky, Kevin Ochsner, Daphna Shohamy, Katrina Armstrong, John Andrew Chwe, Pegah Kassraian Fard, Anna Vannucci, Kevin Bath, Katherine Keyes. (Credit: Steve Myaskovsky for Columbia.)
Indeed, Pegah Kassraian Fard, PhD, an associate research scientist at the Siegelbaum lab, shared her discovery of where memories of individuals linked with threatening experiences are recorded in the brain, a finding with potential relevance for social anxiety disorder. John Andrew Chwe, a Psychology PhD student at the Freeman lab, explored the ways in which our first impressions of others are recorded in the brain.
“In order to make sense of our complicated social worlds, where we oftentimes don't have the optimal amount of information to work from, we often have to rely on first impressions,” Chwe said. “The next step for our work is trying to understand how these representations of people change when you're given the opportunity to incorporate more information about them.”
Anna Vannucci, a Psychology PhD student in the Tottenham lab, detailed the ways in which the vital connections between parents and children are expressed in brain circuitry during development, and how separation, abuse, neglect and other forms of adversity might influence those circuits. Jonathan Kasdin, a Neurobiology and Behavior PhD student at the Gadagkar lab, described how levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine acts as the brain’s way of evaluating success or failure in young male zebra finches learning to emulate their fathers' songs.
The ultimate aims of the symposium and the associated Local Circuits speaker series are to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and build deeper connections among Columbia’s students, faculty and researchers working in neuroscience and related fields.
"'Although great new ideas are usually articulated by individuals, they're nearly always generated by communities,'" said Daphna Shohamy, PhD, director and CEO of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, quoting musician Brian Eno. "'Just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community.' This is really the idea behind this gathering of minds from across our broader community: to share what we're doing and understanding about the biology of how social connections form."
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The Zuckerman Institute hosts Local Circuits seminars as part of its Tuesdays@10 lineup of talks and events, which 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.
