Project description
Understanding the role of neural filters in behaviour decisions
The question of how humans and animals make decisions has intrigued scientists for centuries. Sensory experiences, memories, and internal brain activity are believed to work together to guide behaviour. However, direct evidence of how this integration occurs at various levels remains limited. The ERC-funded SimpleMinds project will explore how the fly brain integrates sensory and internal states, focusing on hunger and tiredness in Drosophila. It suggests that neural filters change sensitivity based on needs; hungry flies become more responsive to food cues. The project aims to visualise neural activity and analyse fly behaviour on a treadmill. It will study factors influencing these filters, such as cell oscillations, to deepen understanding of neural filters and their role in depression.
Objective
How we and other animals make up our minds is an everlasting question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries. Sensory-evoked activity patterns, memory engrams and internally generated brain activity conveying the animals internal state are meant to integrate to promote an appropriate behaviour. Still, direct evidence for how integration works on the network, the neurophysiological and the molecular level remains limited. Exemplifying internal needs with tiredness and hunger, and focusing on the numerically simple brain of Drosophila, we here test a parallel filter hypothesis to explain how sensory and internal states are integrated across the relevant centres of the fly brain. We posit that parallel neural filters will have changed permeability for sensory stimuli and to compete: e.g. if hungry, neural networks promoting food approach behaviour will change their permeability for sensory cues relative to those promoting sleep. Our approach will visualise neural activity, while recording online fly behaviour related to hunger, sleep and experience on a treadmill. It will tackle the physiological basis shaping filters, including oscillatory cell and network activities as well as synaptic gating, while recording whole brain activity. We capitalise on our expertise in functional imaging and previous discoveries of hunger and sleep gates as well as their synaptic and network substrates. We will investigate and interfere with key molecular factors underlying filtering to directly challenge network integration and behavioural outcome. Finally, we will remote control competing parallel filters, to test whether sensory permeability can switch the animals state between an ego- and an allocentric-like world view and whether depression-like states related to learnt helplessness will favour an egocentric filter setting. Understanding neural filter properties should allow further insights to the physiological basis of depressed states.
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-COG
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10117 Berlin
Germany
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