Watch: SCGB Scientists Reflect on 11 Years of Progress in Systems Neuroscience

How do our brain cells interact with each other to pull off the symphony of activity needed to solve problems, create or learn?  The Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB) has investigated these questions for over a decade. As the collaboration enters its final year, its members reflect on their significant progress and how their work has reshaped the field.

SCGB was born from Jim Simons’ curiosity about the mechanisms behind his favorite pastime: thinking. He wanted to know what exactly was going on in his brain while he pondered a math problem, developed a new method or learned a new skill.

It’s a big question, and one that would require many people across diverse disciplines to answer. Luckily, the neuroscience field was at a point where new tools were making it more feasible to study brain circuits by recording the activity across large numbers of neurons at once. With the right minds at work, it was an opportune time to capitalize on those tools and discover how different parts of the brain ‘talk’ to each other to make cognition possible.

In this video, you’ll hear more from SCGB members about how the collaboration began and what makes it different from any other scientific consortium.

 
The ethos behind SCGB was to study lots of neurons across many brain areas, painting a more holistic picture of what goes on during cognition. SCGB brought together experimentalists, theorists, computer scientists and other experts to get the most out of the tools available to them and develop new ways to peer into the brain.

By joining forces and approaching problems from new angles, SCGB members have made discoveries in everything from decision-making to learning natural behaviors

In this video, you’ll hear more from SCGB researchers about their work and how the collaboration has reshaped the way they do science.