In the News
 "Rats Climbing Up Walls for Science" - San Diego News Network, April 26, 2010
Stephen Cowen's rats have some decisions to make and by studying their brains he hopes to understand how the brain weighs costs and benefits to make decisions.

"Hoping My Rhythm-less Brain Can Beat It" - Voice of San Diego, April 1, 2010
Studying rhythm to gain a deeper understanding of how the brain processes language, rhythm and movement, which can aid in the treatment of a variety of diseases including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and language disorders.

"Getting Inside the Brain: Neurosciences Institute Researchers Seek New Knowledge" - La Jolla Light, March 24, 2010
Imagination rules at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, which its Director describes as a scientific monastery for unconventional brain research.

NPR Science Friday, May 1, 2009

 "Snowball Fight" - The Economist, April 30, 2009
Everybody knows that birds sing but it appears that some can dance, too.

"All Things Considered" - NPR, April 30, 2009
Two famous parrots and a bevy of YouTube videos have now convinced scientists that people aren't the only ones who can groove to a musical beat.

 "What Makes You Uniquely You?" - Discover Magazine, February 2009
Some of the most profound questions in science are also the least tangible.  What does it mean to be sentient?  What is the self?  When issues become imponderable, many researchers demur, but neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, dives right in.

"Learning in and from Brain-based Devices" - Science, November 19, 2007

"Evolution in Your Brain" - Discover Magazine, July 3, 2007

“An Introduction to the Nervous Systems” - By Dr. Ralph Greenspan, published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2007

An Introduction to Nervous Systems presents the principles of neurobiology from an evolutionary perspective—from single–celled organisms to complex invertebrates such as flies—and is ideal for use as a supplemental textbook. Greenspan describes the mechanisms that allow behavior to become ever more sophisticated—from simple avoidance behavior of Paramecium through to the complex cognitive behaviors of the honeybee—and shows how these mechanisms produce the increasing neural complexity found in these organisms. The book ends with a discussion of what is universal about nervous systems and what may be required, neurobiologically, to be human.

"2007: The year of the 'expert wiki'?" - arstechnica.com, January 12, 2007

The (Scholarpedia) project is headed by Eugene Izhikevich, a senior fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in California. Izhikevich is a mathematician by training, earning his degree in Moscow and then doing PhD work at Michigan State; the project will start by covering only areas in which he has some knowledge. At first, Scholarpedia will deal only with computational neuroscience, dynamical systems, and computational intelligence, all of which will grow into broader categories if there's enough interest. Scholarpedia currently has less than one hundred articles, all of them about such specialized topics as "Bayesian Ying Yang Learning," "Bogdanov-Takens Bifurcation," and (my personal favorite) "Bubbling Transition."

"How you interpret a simple rhythm depends on what language you speak" - Scienceupdate.com Podcast, December 28, 2006

Although the tones are evenly spaced, if you’re a native English speaker, you probably hear something like dah-dahhh, dah-dahhh, da-dahhh. This way of grouping the sounds was once considered universal. But now an international team including John Iversen of The Neurosciences Institute has played the sequence to Japanese speakers.

"I think, therefore I am, I think" - The Economist, December 19, 2006

IN A building that looks, from the outside, like the villain's lair in an early James Bond film, a robot moves around. Called Darwin XI, it is the brainchild of Gerald Edelman. The building is the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, and Dr Edelman is one of an eclectic group of researchers—some of them neurologists and some philosophers—who are trying to explain what is, perhaps, the biggest mystery of the human brain: the nature of consciousness.…

"What you speak may affect what you hear" - NewScientist.com news service, December 1, 2006

What you speak may influence what you hear, a new study shows. People perceive different patterns in the same sound sequences depending on their native tongue, researchers have found.

"New Study Suggests Speakers Of Different Languages Perceive Rhythm Differently" - American Institute of Physics, December 1, 2006

Do the sounds of our native languages affect how we hear music and other non-language sounds" A team of American and Japanese researchers has found evidence that native languages influence the way people group non-language sounds into rhythms.

"How the Mother Tongue Influences the Musical Ear" – 4th ASA/ASJ Joint Meeting, November 30, 2006

Honolulu, Hawaii: When we listen to the ticking of a clock, we often hear "tick-tock," even if the sounds the clock makes are identical (try this with your wristwatch). The reason for this is that we naturally group sounds together into larger rhythmic units. Grouping is an essential component of speech and music perception, affecting, for example, how we break a continuous stream of sound into words and phrases. More than a century ago, scientists described several rules that govern how we group sounds. Since these rules hold for listeners across a number of different Western cultures, they have come to be thought of as universal, innate aspects of auditory perception. We find, however, that listeners from a Western and an Eastern culture (America and Japan) group simple tone patterns in different ways. That is, they perceive different rhythms in identical sequences of sound. This difference appears to be closely related to the rhythms of each culture's predominant language, English and Japanese, suggesting that the mother tongue affects how we perceive non-linguistic sound at a very basic level.

"Brain Box" - New Scientist, November 5, 2006

They built a robot that thinks like we do and set it loose to explore the world. Darwin X's brain emulates the structure of a living mammalian brain. Each region is made of neurons unique to that region. Some, such as the hippocampus, even incorporate many smaller neuronal networks, just like those in a human brain.  

"Is There Room for the Soul? New challenges to our most cherished beliefs about self and the human spirit" -
 U.S. News& World Report, October 15, 2006

The most ambitious of these scientists-call them, if you will, the hard-core demystifiers-came to believe quite strongly that most of the mysteries of the mind, if not all of them, are reducible to the biochemical mechanisms underlying these neural networks. These scientists have been a formidable lot, including at least a couple of Nobel laureates who moved to the study of consciousness after doing major work in other fields. One of them, Gerald Edelman, winner of the 1972 prize for his work in immunology, is the founder and director of the Neurosciences Institute, which sits to the west of the Salk Institute on the same La Jolla mesa. Edelman launched the institute in 1981 as part of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City but brought it to La Jolla in 1993, where he also chairs the neurobiology department of the Scripps Research Institute, directly across the street from Neurosciences. A man as conversant with philosophy, literature, and music as he is with science-his early passion was the violin, but he feared he lacked the right stuff to perform-Edelman went into medicine, and then research. As he explains when we meet in his office, Darwin's theory of natural selection is what guided his groundbreaking research on antibody structures, and it is what underlies his theory of neuronal group selection in his work on consciousness. "I wanted to bring Darwin's selectional process to neurons," he says.

"Flyweights, Yes, but Fighters Nonetheless: Fruit Flies Bred for Aggressiveness" -  New York Times, October 10, 2006

What can stand on its hind legs and duke it out with its front feet, boxing and tussling like a four-armed pugilist? The answer: a strain of laboratory fruit flies bred for shameless aggressiveness toward their own kind.

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"The Brain? It’s A Jungle in There" – New York Times, March 27, 2004

La Jolla, California: Spend enough time talking with Dr. Gerald M. Edelman, and eventually his theory about how consciousness develops will seem confirmed by experience. Somehow, out of anecdotes about Andy Warhol, Friedrich von Hayek, Jascha Heifetz and Linus Pauling, out of free-floating riffs, vaudevillian jokes, recollections, citations, arguments and patient explanations, out of the excited explosions of example and counterexample, associations develop, mental terrain is reordered, and ever-grander patterns emerge. The immensity of Dr. Edelman’s project – explaining the development of the human mind – overwhelms.

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"Gene gives right-handers clockwise swirls" – Times of India, September 6, 2003

Washington: New research reveals that a gene could be the cause as to why right-handed people tend to have hair that swirls clockwise. “It’s one of the most exciting things [I’ve seen] in a while,” says geneticist Ralph Greenspan of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California. According to him, such a gene could lead to asymmetry throughout the body.

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"Music key in unlocking mysteries of consciousness" – Miami Herald-International Edition, July 12, 2003

“For too long, the neuroscience of language has been studied in isolation,” wrote Aniruddh Patel, a scholar at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “Music is now stepping into this breach, and via comparative analysis with language, providing a more complete and coherent picture of the mind than can be achieved by studying either domain alone.”

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"Flies are like us scientists" – Courier-Mail, Queensland, Australia, July 8, 2003

Ralph Greenspan, who presented his research on fruit fly brains at an International Genetics Congress in Melbourne, said they only had a quarter of a million neurons compared to human brains, which have about 100 billion. However, flies share with humans similar learning and memory traits as well as sleep behavior and perception.

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"A Mozart brainteaser" – Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2003

Does listening to the master’s music make you smarter? At The Neurosciences Institute, a concert series and lectures address the claim. …appearances by three neuroscientists: Richard Restak of George Washington University, Lawrence Parsons of the National Science Foundation and Ani Patel of The Neurosciences Institute.

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"Fruit Flies Have Rudiments of Thought" – Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2003

Fruit flies have the rudiments of consciousness, according to a study published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Bruno van Swinderen and Ralph Greenspan of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego presented flies with various images. The flies responded with a characteristic burst of brain activity.

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"Unraveling the mysteries of the brain" – Cover Story – La Jolla Light, Thursday, October 3, 2002

Scientists at La Jolla's Neurosciences Institute are using unconventional methods to build an understanding of the brain. But, can studies of robots, fruit flies and music really make a difference in our lives? Nobel Laureate Dr. Gerald Edelman says yes.

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"Neurosciences study released" – San Diego Daily Transcript, June 4, 2002

Scientists at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla reported Monday they've discovered a way to identify what genes change during the animal and plant-breeding process.

With the use of DNA microarrays, a team of scientists, led by Ralph Greenspan, studied two strains of the common fruit fly, selected for differences in their response to gravity. They determined the difference was due to small contributions from many genes, and identified several of the genes including two with human genetic counterparts.

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"Secrets of sleep deprivation" – BBC News, May 17, 2002

Flies bred lacking their “cycle” gene tended to die after missing only 10 hours of sleep, found scientists from The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California.

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"Sleep Genes Identified" – Technology Review, May 17, 2002

After two centuries of animal studies aimed at unlocking the secrets of sleep, researchers at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego have identified two genes that apparently protect fruit flies from dying from lack of rest.

So far, the similarities between sleep in the fly and human sleep have been eerily similar. Thus, they sleep about the same amount of time.

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"Sleep genes are made of these!" – The Province, Vancouver, BC, May 16, 2002

PARIS – U.S. Neuroscientists have cast light on the secret world of sleep, identifying key genes in fruitflies that appear to regulate our need for a nap and may even stop us from dying from lack of sleep.

Paul Shaw and colleagues at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, studied fruitflies that had been modified so that they lacked a key circadian gene nicknamed “cycle”.

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"Promise and peril in a marriage of brains and silicon" – U.S. News and World Report, May 13, 2002

Andrew Schwartz of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California has been working with monkeys that perform a task in a 3-D virtual-reality environment rather than on a screen. They learn to move a “floating” ball with their mind alone as skillfully as they can with a joystick.

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"Scientist links emotions & brain" – La Jolla Village News & Golden Triangle, February 27, 2002

Dr. Antonio Damasio speaks on emotions and the brain during a February 4 lecture at The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive. The renowned scientist is studying the way emotions and feelings interact with brain functions.

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"Brain research gets smarter" - San Diego Union Tribune, February 11, 2001

Clunky little NOMAD is showing us how our minds work. A 2-foot-tall aluminum cylinder named NOMAD rolls toward a small block and aims its video camera downward.

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"A Learning Experience"  - KPBS ON AIR, January 2001

 In the season premier of Scientific American Frontiers that aired this past November, Alan Alda visited The Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in La Jolla, where a robot named NOMAD (Neurally Organized Mobile Adaptive Device) was developing a "taste" for certain objects and discovering a fundamental fact of life - that we learn from our experiences. Unlike other artificially intelligent robots, NOMAD "thinks" and is based on a theory that no two people's brains are the same. Even so, great minds do think alike, especially at a place like NSI.

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"Even Fruit Flies Catch Their Zs"- Los Angeles Times, January 4, 2001

 Researchers have focused on the rest habits of the tiny insect in hopes of finding clues to why we sleep. Among their finds: Flies get a buzz from caffeine, and sleep-deprived flies get tired. Rats do it, cats do it, birds do it, dolphins and people too. We sleep - an activity so widespread, so important and so basic, its usually taken for granted.

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