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Learning as a functional state of the brain

José María Delgado García

Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville)

17 Feb 2023 13:00

Aketxe Room, Sede Building, Leioa

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The most important thing that I have learned across my scientific life is that the complexity of brain functions can only be approached by multidisciplinary, comparative, and at live approaches. The availability of genetically manipulated mammals (mice and rats) and of sophisticated electrophysiological and pharmacological techniques, susceptible of being applied in behaving animals during the acquisition of new motor and cognitive abilities, have largely facilitated my scientific approach in the past 20 years. In this regard, our group has studied the contribution of cortical, subcortical and cerebellar circuits to associative (Pavlovian, instrumental), social, brain-machine, and decision-making learning paradigms. For this, we have recorded unitary firing rates, local field potentials, and activity dependent changes in synaptic strength in cortical and subcortical neurons during the respective acquisition processes. The main output of our studies is that learning is the result of the activity of wide cortical and subcortical circuits activating particular functional properties of involved synaptic nodes and that brain functions during learning processes have to be studied at the very moment of the acquisition process. During my presentation I will present recent experimental evidences from our laboratory supporting the all the above contentions.

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