Grant: Operating Grant

We navigate through our everyday environment with ease. Yet, in a completely unconscious manner, we are successfully solving some very difficult problems. We easily recognize a friend's voice even though they may be far away and their voice faint. Once having recognized their voice, we can quickly determine where it is coming from and move towards them. Remarkably, this is all happening in a noisy environment with other speakers and traffic noise presenting a potentially confusing mix of sounds. The human nervous system is so complex and powerful that we have no idea of how we can so readily perform these amazing feats. And, when disease or age cause some detioration in this wonderful abilities, we do not know how to mitigate their effects. Our research has used a special model system- the weakly electric fish- to investigate these problems. These fish can detect weak inputs emanating from prey and swim towards them; and they can do this in the presence of noise that masks the prey signals. In the small and relatively simple fish brain we have been able to identify key principles of sensory processing relevant to the human condition. For example, we have found that a special part of the brain- the cerebellum- can act to cancel background noise. In fact, we have found that it acts in much the same way as the commercially available noise cancelling headphones popular with air travelers. Our brains also contain a large cerebellum and our work suggests that enhancing its function might be a good strategy for improving attentional focus.