41st Annual Convention of the Society for Neuroscience

November 12-16 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC

Cortech Solutions invites you to attend the 2011 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting with us in Washington DC! We will have a booth in the exhibition hall and our partners will organize several excellent workshops. Neuroscience 2011 is the premier venue for neuroscientists from around the world to debut cutting-edge research on the brain and nervous system.

See Us at Booth 1702 in the Exhibit Hall

This Year's Dialogues Lecture: Economics and Behavior
Animal Spirits: How Human Behavior Drives the Economy

Robert J. Shiller, PhD, is an American economist, academic, and best-selling author. He currently serves as the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a Fellow at the Yale International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. Ranked among the 100 most influential economists of the world, Shiller’s work has addressed how psychological factors influence decision-making in the economic arena and the impact of group dynamics on financial markets. Join Dr. Shiller, SfN President Susan Amara, and neuroscientists Antonio Rangel and Wolfram Schultz for an exciting opportunity to examine the interplay between economics and the brain.

Featured Lectures

Albert and Ellen Grass Lecture

Optimal Integration of Sensory Evidence: A Bayesian Journey Through Our Sixth Sense 
Speaker: Dora E. Angelaki, PhD
Baylor College of Medicine
Support contributed by The Grass Foundation

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Monday, November 14, 2011, 3:15 PM-4:25 PM

As we navigate through the world and interact with our environment, salient computations ensure spatial orientation is maintained effortlessly, largely because of our sixth sense, the vestibular system. Neural circuits use an internal model of universal physical laws and multisensory integration to resolve ambiguities inherent in our sensors. Further, cortical multisensory integration with visual motion cues ensures improved precision of spatial perception. Both properties are predicted by Bayesian integration in a framework that our brain performs optimal statistical inference.

 

David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics

A Neanderthal Perspective on Human Origins 
Speaker: Svante Paabo, PhD
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
Support contributed by David Kopf Instruments

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Monday, November 14, 2011, 10:00 AM-11:10 AM

Recently produced draft sequences of two extinct human forms, Neandertals and Denisovans help identify novel genomic features that appeared recently in present-day humans, as well as genomic regions likely to have been affected by positive selection in modern humans since their divergence from a common ancestor shared with Neandertals and Denisovans. The lecture will share analysis of some such candidates, as well as work that focuses on the evolution FOXP2 in humans, a gene involved in the development of speech and language. 

 

Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society

Animal Spirits: How Human Behavior Drives the Economy 
Speaker: Robert Shiller, PhD
Yale University
Support contributed by Elsevier

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Saturday, November 12, 2011, 11:00 AM-1:00 PM

Robert J. Shiller, PhD, is an American economist, academic, and best-selling author. He currently serves as the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a Fellow at the Yale International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. Ranked among the 100 most influential economists of the world, Shiller's work has addressed how psychological factors influence decision-making in the economic arena and the impact of group dynamics on financial markets. Join Dr. Shiller and leading neuroscientists for an exciting opportunity to examine the interplay between economics and the brain. 

 

History of Neuroscience Lecture

Neurodegenerative Diseases: The Path to Therapy 
Speaker: Anne B. Young, MD, PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital
Support contributed by AstraZeneca

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 2:30 PM-3:40 PM

Forty years ago, neurodegenerative diseases were thought to be rare illnesses. Now as the population ages, they have become a major health issue. For years work focused on the detailed pathology of the disorders, but more recently the genetic era has allowed researchers to define some of these illnesses genetically. Targets for therapy have evolved to where preventative therapies are now in clinical trials. These illnesses have emerged from obscurity to everyday conversation. Now, we just have to cure them. 

 

Peter and Patricia Gruber Lecture

Rett Syndrome: Linking Epigenetics and Neuronal Plasticity 
Speaker: Huda Y. Zoghbi, MD
Baylor College of Medicine/Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Support contributed by The Peter & Patricia Gruber Foundation

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Sunday, November 13, 2011, 2:30 PM-3:40 PM

Rett syndrome is a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by a range of severe neurological and behavioral disabilities. It is caused by mutations in MECP2 that encodes Methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MeCP2), which modulates the expression levels of other genes through chromatin remodeling. Mutations in MECP2 also cause a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders ranging from mild learning deficits and autism to early-onset schizophrenia. Recent discoveries show MeCP2 is critical for neurons to function normally. The lecture discusses how genetic, molecular, and electrophysiological studies are demonstrating the critical role of MeCP2 in postnatal brain function and synaptic plasticity, and providing insight into the pathogenesis of Rett syndrome and other neuropsychiatric disorders. 

 

Presidential Special Lecture

Genes, the Environment, and Decisions: How Fixed Circuits Generate Flexible Behaviors 
Speaker: Cornelia I. Bargmann, PhD
Rockefeller University
Support contributed by MedImmune

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Monday, November 14, 2011, 5:15 PM-6:25 PM

How do genes and the environment interact to generate flexible behaviors? How are behavioral decisions modified by context and experience? Genetic variation, internal states, and environmental conditions converge on common neuronal circuits to regulate behaviors in the nematode worm C. elegans. Analysis of these circuits shows the detailed wiring diagram of C. elegans is both incomplete and ambiguous, because modulatory inputs invisible in the anatomical wiring change the flow of information. 

 

Neurotrophins: From Axon Growth to Synaptic Plasticity 
Speaker: Mu-ming Poo, PhD
University of California - Berkeley, Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Support contributed by Lundbeck Research USA

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Saturday, November 12, 2011, 5:15 PM-6:25 PM

Neurotrophins were first identified as target-derived factors that promote neuronal differentiation and survival. Over the past decades, they also were found to regulate neuronal differentiation, axonal and dendritic growth, synapse formation and plasticity, as well as cognition and behavior. This lecture provides a retrospective view of the evolving concepts in study of neurotrophins, with some highlights on recent findings on the role of neurotrophins in axon development and synaptic plasticity. 

 

The Basal Ganglia: Binding Values to Action 
Speaker: Ann M Graybiel, PhD
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Support contributed by Johnson & Johnson

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Sunday, November 13, 2011, 5:15 PM-6:25 PM

We usually think of cortical circuits as controlling what we do, but our behavior also is influenced by deep brain structures including the basal ganglia. This lecture will summarize evidence that neural activity in cortico-basal ganglia circuits can exhibit high levels of flexibility related to value-based decision-making and adaptive behavior, but also can become overly fixed despite the need for change. This interplay between flexibility and fixity, if imbalanced, may underlie dysfunctions leading to motor and neuropsychiatric problems in basal ganglia-based disorders. 

 

The Epigenetic Basis of Common Human Disease 
Speaker: Andrew P. Feinberg, MD
Johns Hopkins University
Support contributed by Pfizer, Inc.

Location: Hall D
Date & Time: Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 5:15 PM-6:25 PM

Epigenetics is the study of heritable information other than the sequence of DNA. We are taking an integrated approach to catalyze the generalization of gene-specific to genomic epigenetics and to advance the focus from cancer to common disease. Doing this requires an integration of new conceptual, technological, epidemiological, and statistical approaches. Epigenetic variation influenced by genetic variants could help mediate complex traits. We have identified sites of stochastic epigenetic variation in the genome that are stably linked to traits such as body mass index.