Richard A. Andersen (neuroscientist)

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Richard Alan Andersen (born October 27, 1950)[ citation needed ] is an American neuroscientist. He is the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. [1] His research focuses on visual physiology with an emphasis on translational research to humans in the field of neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and cortical repair.

Contents

Richard Alan Andersen
BornOctober 27, 1950 (1950-10-27) (age 73)
New Kensington, Pennsylvania, United States
Alma mater
Awards W. Alden Spencer Award (1994)
Scientific career
Fields Neuroscience
Institutions California Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Thesis Functional Connections of the Central Auditory Nervous System: Thalamocortical, Corticothalamic and Corticotectal Connections of the AI, AII and AAF Auditory Cortical Fields  (1979)
Doctoral advisor Michael Merzenich
Other academic advisors Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle
Website www.vis.caltech.edu

Biography

Andersen was born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, on October 27, 1950. [1] [ citation needed ] He received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at the University of California, Davis, in 1973, working in the laboratory of Prof. Robert Scobey over two summers. [1] Andersen then received his PhD in physiology under the mentorship of Prof. Michael Merzenich from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1979. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Vernon Mountcastle at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1981. After serving as an assistant and associate professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California and an adjunct associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, he moved to MIT, first as an associate and later as a full professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. In 1993 he moved to Caltech to join the Division of Biology.

Andersen, an author of over 200 scientific publications, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, AAAS and the Neuroscience Research Program in La Jolla, California, and he holds several patents in the area of biotechnology. He has served as principal or co-investigator on dozens of grants, raising millions of dollars for basic and applied research in the visual neurosciences. Andersen has served as the director of Caltech's Sloan-Schwartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology and MIT's McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience as well as serving on numerous advisory and editorial boards. He has delivered numerous named lectureships and has served as a visiting professor at the Collège de France.

Awards he has received have included the McKnight Neuroscience Brain Disorders Award, NASA Tech Brief Award, the McKnight Technical Innovation in Neuroscience Award, the Spencer Award from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and the McKnight Foundation Scholars Award. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. [2]

Research

Early work centered on the discovery and elucidation of cortical gain fields, a general rule of multiplicative computation used by many areas of the cortex. [3] [4] Andersen and Zipser of UCSD developed one of the first neural network models of cortical function, which generated a mathematical basis for testing hypotheses based on laboratory findings. [5] His research established that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is involved in forming movement intentions—the early and abstract plans for movement. [6] Previously this part of the brain was thought only to function for spatial awareness and attention. His laboratory discovered the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) in the PPC and established its role in eye movements. [7] He also discovered the parietal reach region, an area involved in forming early reach plans. [8] His lab has also made a number of discoveries related to visual motion perception. He established that the middle temporal area processes the perception of form from motion. [9] He found that the perception of the direction of heading, important for navigation, is computed in the brain using both visual stimuli and eye movement signals. [10] His lab has also determined how eye position and limb position signals are combined for eye-hand coordination. [11]

In recent years he has extended his research to translational studies. His group has established that the intention signals from the PPC can be used as control signals for neural prosthetics. [12] Neural prosthetics can assist paralyzed patients by recording their brain signals, interpreting them, and then allowing them to use these processed signals to control external, assistive devices such as robot limbs, computers or wheelchairs simply using by thinking about it. Another new direction the Andersen group is pursuing is the use of electrical stimulation for brain repair.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual cortex</span> Region of the brain that processes visual information

The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and then reaches the visual cortex. The area of the visual cortex that receives the sensory input from the lateral geniculate nucleus is the primary visual cortex, also known as visual area 1 (V1), Brodmann area 17, or the striate cortex. The extrastriate areas consist of visual areas 2, 3, 4, and 5.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cerebral cortex</span> Outer layer of the cerebrum of the mammalian brain

The cerebral cortex, also known as the cerebral mantle, is the outer layer of neural tissue of the cerebrum of the brain in humans and other mammals. It is the largest site of neural integration in the central nervous system, and plays a key role in attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, and consciousness. The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain responsible for cognition.

Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parietal lobe</span> Part of the brain responsible for sensory input and some language processing

The parietal lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The parietal lobe is positioned above the temporal lobe and behind the frontal lobe and central sulcus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claustrum</span> Structure in the brain

The claustrum is a thin sheet of neurons and supporting glial cells, that connects to the cerebral cortex and subcortical regions including the amygdala, hippocampus and thalamus of the brain. It is located between the insular cortex laterally and the putamen medially, encased by the extreme and external capsules respectively. Blood to the claustrum is supplied by the middle cerebral artery. It is considered to be the most densely connected structure in the brain, and thus hypothesized to allow for the integration of various cortical inputs such as vision, sound and touch, into one experience. Other hypotheses suggest that the claustrum plays a role in salience processing, to direct attention towards the most behaviorally relevant stimuli amongst the background noise. The claustrum is difficult to study given the limited number of individuals with claustral lesions and the poor resolution of neuroimaging.

The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.

Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities may be integrated by the nervous system. A coherent representation of objects combining modalities enables animals to have meaningful perceptual experiences. Indeed, multisensory integration is central to adaptive behavior because it allows animals to perceive a world of coherent perceptual entities. Multisensory integration also deals with how different sensory modalities interact with one another and alter each other's processing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retinotopy</span> Mapping of visual input from the retina to neurons

Retinotopy is the mapping of visual input from the retina to neurons, particularly those neurons within the visual stream. For clarity, 'retinotopy' can be replaced with 'retinal mapping', and 'retinotopic' with 'retinally mapped'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neural oscillation</span> Brainwaves, repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system

Neural oscillations, or brainwaves, are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. Neural tissue can generate oscillatory activity in many ways, driven either by mechanisms within individual neurons or by interactions between neurons. In individual neurons, oscillations can appear either as oscillations in membrane potential or as rhythmic patterns of action potentials, which then produce oscillatory activation of post-synaptic neurons. At the level of neural ensembles, synchronized activity of large numbers of neurons can give rise to macroscopic oscillations, which can be observed in an electroencephalogram. Oscillatory activity in groups of neurons generally arises from feedback connections between the neurons that result in the synchronization of their firing patterns. The interaction between neurons can give rise to oscillations at a different frequency than the firing frequency of individual neurons. A well-known example of macroscopic neural oscillations is alpha activity.

David J. Heeger is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, computer scientist, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He is a professor at New York University, Chief Scientific Officer of Statespace Labs, and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Epistemic AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Posterior parietal cortex</span> Part of the human brain

The posterior parietal cortex plays an important role in planned movements, spatial reasoning, and attention.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retrosplenial cortex</span> Part of the brains cerebral cortex

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is a cortical area in the brain comprising Brodmann areas 29 and 30. It is secondary association cortex, making connections with numerous other brain regions. The region's name refers to its anatomical location immediately behind the splenium of the corpus callosum in primates, although in rodents it is located more towards the brain surface and is relatively larger. Its function is currently not well understood, but its location close to visual areas and also to the hippocampal spatial/memory system suggest it may have a role in mediating between perceptual and memory functions, particularly in the spatial domain. However, its exact contribution to either space or memory processing has been hard to pin down.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earl K. Miller</span>

Earl Keith Miller is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on neural mechanisms of cognitive, or executive, control. Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of SplitSage. He is a co-founder of Neuroblox.

Michael Steven Anthony Graziano is an American scientist and novelist who is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. His scientific research focuses on the brain basis of awareness. He has proposed the "attention schema" theory, an explanation of how, and for what adaptive advantage, brains attribute the property of awareness to themselves. His previous work focused on how the cerebral cortex monitors the space around the body and controls movement within that space. Notably he has suggested that the classical map of the body in motor cortex, the homunculus, is not correct and is better described as a map of complex actions that make up the behavioral repertoire. His publications on this topic have had a widespread impact among neuroscientists but have also generated controversy. His novels rely partly on his background in psychology and are known for surrealism or magic realism. Graziano also composes music including symphonies and string quartets.

Ralph Mitchell Siegel, a researcher who studied the neurological underpinnings of vision, was a professor of neuroscience at Rutgers University, Newark, in the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience. He died September 2, 2011, at his home following a long illness.

Gain field encoding is a hypothesis about the internal storage and processing of limb motion in the brain. In the motor areas of the brain, there are neurons which collectively have the ability to store information regarding both limb positioning and velocity in relation to both the body (intrinsic) and the individual's external environment (extrinsic). The input from these neurons is taken multiplicatively, forming what is referred to as a gain field. The gain field works as a collection of internal models off of which the body can base its movements. The process of encoding and recalling these models is the basis of muscle memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lateral pulvinar nucleus</span>

Lateral pulvinar nucleus is one of four traditionally anatomically distinguished nuclei of the pulvinar of the thalamus. The other three nuclei of the pulvinar are called anterior, inferior and medial pulvinar nuclei.

The term posterior cortical hot zone was coined by Christof Koch and colleagues to describe the part of the neocortex closely associated with the minimal neural substrate essential for conscious perception. The posterior cortical hot zone includes sensory cortical areas in the parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. It is the “sensory” cortex, much as the frontal cortex is the “action” cortex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Olaf Blanke</span> Swiss and German physician, neurologist and neuroscientist

Olaf Blanke is a Swiss and German physician, neurologist and neuroscientist. He holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute of EPFL and is professor of Neurology at Geneva University Hospitals. Blanke is known for his research on the neurological bases of self-consciousness and out-of-body experiences.

Tirin Moore is an American neuroscientist who is a Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for his work on the neural mechanisms of visual perception, visually guided behavior and cognition. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Davis, Tinsley H. (2008-06-17). "Profile of Richard A. Andersen". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105 (24): 8167–8169. Bibcode:2008PNAS..105.8167D. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0804405105 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   2448808 . PMID   18550826.
  2. ↑ "Richard A. Andersen". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2021-05-24.
  3. ↑ Andersen, R. A.; Mountcastle, V. B. (1983-03-01). "The influence of the angle of gaze upon the excitability of the light- sensitive neurons of the posterior parietal cortex". Journal of Neuroscience. 3 (3): 532–548. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.03-03-00532.1983. ISSN   0270-6474. PMC   6564545 . PMID   6827308.
  4. ↑ Andersen, R. A.; Essick, G. K.; Siegel, R. M. (1985-10-25). "Encoding of spatial location by posterior parietal neurons". Science. 230 (4724): 456–458. Bibcode:1985Sci...230..456A. doi:10.1126/science.4048942. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   4048942.
  5. ↑ Zipser, David; Andersen, Richard A. (1988). "A back-propagation programmed network that simulates response properties of a subset of posterior parietal neurons". Nature. 331 (6158): 679–684. Bibcode:1988Natur.331..679Z. doi:10.1038/331679a0. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   3344044. S2CID   4247425.
  6. ↑ Gnadt, J. W.; Andersen, R. A. (1988-03-01). "Memory related motor planning activity in posterior parietal cortex of macaque". Experimental Brain Research. 70 (1): 216–220. doi:10.1007/BF00271862. ISSN   1432-1106. PMID   3402565. S2CID   8411726.
  7. ↑ Andersen, R. A.; Asanuma, C.; Cowan, W. M. (1985). "Callosal and prefrontal associational projecting cell populations in area 7A of the macaque monkey: A study using retrogradely transported fluorescent dyes". Journal of Comparative Neurology. 232 (4): 443–455. doi:10.1002/cne.902320403. ISSN   1096-9861. PMID   3980763. S2CID   42128535.
  8. ↑ Snyder, L. H.; Batista, A. P.; Andersen, R. A. (1997). "Coding of intention in the posterior parietal cortex". Nature. 386 (6621): 167–170. Bibcode:1997Natur.386..167S. doi:10.1038/386167a0. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   9062187. S2CID   4280303.
  9. ↑ Bradley, David C.; Chang, Grace C.; Andersen, Richard A. (1998). "Encoding of three-dimensional structure-from-motion by primate area MT neurons". Nature. 392 (6677): 714–717. Bibcode:1998Natur.392..714B. doi:10.1038/33688. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   9565031. S2CID   4361995.
  10. ↑ Bradley, D. C.; Maxwell, M.; Andersen, R. A.; Banks, M. S.; Shenoy, K. V. (1996-09-13). "Mechanisms of Heading Perception in Primate Visual Cortex". Science. 273 (5281): 1544–1547. Bibcode:1996Sci...273.1544B. doi:10.1126/science.273.5281.1544. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   8703215. S2CID   42751629.
  11. ↑ Pesaran, Bijan; Nelson, Matthew J.; Andersen, Richard A. (2006-07-06). "Dorsal Premotor Neurons Encode the Relative Position of the Hand, Eye, and Goal during Reach Planning". Neuron. 51 (1): 125–134. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2006.05.025. ISSN   0896-6273. PMC   3066049 . PMID   16815337.
  12. ↑ Musallam, S.; Corneil, B. D.; Greger, B.; Scherberger, H.; Andersen, R. A. (2004-07-09). "Cognitive Control Signals for Neural Prosthetics". Science. 305 (5681): 258–262. Bibcode:2004Sci...305..258M. doi:10.1126/science.1097938. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   15247483. S2CID   3112034.
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