Grant: Project Grant

Our sensory experience of the world remains stable and predictable, even as we move through our environment and interact with it in complex ways. This is because our brains are somehow able to seamlessly integrate action and perception. Before our muscles even move, our brain is predicting the consequences of those actions on what we see, hear, and feel. This is why, for example, it is nearly impossible to tickle yourself--your brain is ready for the sensation and actively filters out the "ticklishness." When the brain systems that perform functions like this fail, the consequences can range from motion sickness and vertigo to the kinds of hallucinations and delusions that characterize schizophrenia. How the integration of sensory input and behaviour happens is only partly understood. To understand what events happen in individual nerve cells during integration, we are studying this process in a tiny roundworm. Despite its simplicity, it has to solve the same action-perception problems we do in order to successfully interpret and navigate in its environemnt. This same simplicity means that we can study molecular events, signaling between nerve cells, and behaviour all at the same time in an intact animal. Because all animals share the same fundamental biology at this level, what we learn will help us understand what happens in both healthy and dysfunctional brains to allow action and perception to work together.