This lecture is organised by the Programme on Mind and Machine, an Oxford Martin School Programme and The Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour

Speaker: Gilles Laurent, Director, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt/Main

Summary: Gilles will be presenting his recent experimental work his lab has undertaken to try and decipher visual computation in reptilian cortex, a three-layer structure close to mammalian paleo- and archi-cortices, probably close to the dorsal pallial structure that existed in their common ancestor some 320 million years ago. Their approach is to develop and combine behavioral, electrophysiological, optical, electron microscopic and molecular techniques on a system that presents a number of experimental advantages, and to eventually shed light on the computational architecture of cerebral cortex.

For further information please contact Fiona Woods at fiona.woods@cncb.ox.ac.uk

About the Speaker

After studying veterinary medicine and neuroethology in Toulouse, Gilles Laurent was a Locke Research Fellow of the Royal Society in Cambridge (1987-1990). In 1990, he joined the Division of Biology and the Computation and Neural Systems Program at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He stayed on the faculty at Caltech until 2009, when he became a director at the Max Planck Institute of Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main.