The Anatomy Of The Soul: Neural Circuits For Flexible And Adaptive Survival Behaviors

The struggle for survival require animals to set and weigh off goals in a way that is adaptive and responsive to the context of the environment. Intense evolutionary pressure has wired these algorithms for survival into the connectivity and gene expression patterns of neural circuits. In this talk, I will present a pair of recent studies of the structure of animal behavior and its neural correlates, in which we use theory and modeling to uncover the computational mechanisms by which the brain sets survival goals and weigh off competing survival needs. I will also share our lab’s work in using behavioral forecasting as a tool to build generative models of complex animal behavior.