People love when their predictions are right and hate when their predictions are wrong.
Read Montague was one of the first researchers to propose the new idea that dopamine neurons play a role in reward prediction error (the difference between what you expect and what you receive), which is essential for human decision-making. theorized to be an evolutionary trait. what should we run towards? what should we run away from?
Montague, currently director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research, the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, and the Computational Psychiatry Unit of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, was invited to present his findings at an event sponsored and hosted. , one of seven world leaders in neuroscience. at the Nobel Conference in Stockholm. His talk “Decoding Human Neuromodulatory Signaling and Its Connections to Reinforcement Learning” will be part of Nobel’s mini-his symposium on September 8th and 9th at the Carolinxa Institute. department.
By bringing together pioneers in the field, the Nobel Assembly is drawing attention to new approaches to understanding mental illness and highlighting how the latest research is changing the way we think about mental illness. .
Montague is working on a new field, computational psychiatry, which it has helped develop over the last 15 years. This is now a major funding initiative of the National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institutes of Health. New technologies have accelerated progress.
Dr. Montague uses Furaline, which measures dopamine and serotonin in the brains of living humans in less than a second, including Parkinson’s patients undergoing deep brain stimulation and children in epilepsy monitoring units evaluating epileptic foci. We share techniques developed in our biomedical laboratories. Seizure.
“The dopamine system is hijacked by any drug of abuse,” says Montague, who is also a physics professor at the Virginia Tech School of Science. It is a system that is overworked and involved in mood regulation and its dysfunction.
“One approach to that is to capture cell functions and their computations in equations and models that view them as interactions,” Montague said. It directs its research in a highly practical and necessary area of mental function.”
This symposium is organized around the topic of dopamine as part of the central nervous system underlying reward anticipation and scientific research in psychiatric and behavioral disorders. Montague shares its latest discoveries with the world’s leading brain scientists. The talk will be published online and open to the public after the event.
said Michael Friedlander, vice president and executive vice president of health sciences and technology at Virginia Tech. Director of the Furalin Biomedical Research Institute. “By simultaneously measuring the activity of both dopamine and serotonin, receptors and uptake sites are prime therapeutic targets for disorders ranging from depression to Parkinson’s disease. His research opens a whole new window into how the brain works.” open.”
Symposium organizers aim to connect scientists at the forefront of elucidating the role of dopamine neurons in reward prediction error with researchers who have further developed this concept.
Wolfram Schultz, a physiologist at the University of Cambridge, and Peter Dayan, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and professor at the University of Tübingen, also address attendees as early researchers in the field. .
Dayan and Montague shared the title of editor-in-chief of Computational Psychiatry, a journal they founded in 2015 to focus on original research, including theoretical, computational and statistical approaches to mental function and dysfunction. . The two had started collaborating 30 years before him as postdoctoral researchers at one of the country’s first computational neurobiology laboratories, trying to understand dopamine neurons in the brainstem.
“These are new ways of understanding mental illness, fueled by fundamentally new sources of information,” said Montague. Montague focuses on the relationship between the physical mechanisms of real neural tissue and the computational functions they embody. The Nobel Conference’s spotlighting of this research is a sign of recognition of its importance.
