NEUROETHOLOGY OU PRESIDENTIAL DREAM COURSE LECTURE
Sponsored by the OU President's Office, CBN, & the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
William Kristan
Distinguished Professor, Section of Neurobiology
University of California, San Diego
"THINKING LIKE A LEECH: COMPLEX DECISIONS IN A SIMPLE NERVOUS SYSTEM"
7 PM, Thursday, November 11, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, 2401 Chautauqua Ave., Norman, OK 73072
We like to think that we make rational decisions, based upon carefully weighing all relevant evidence. Often, however, our choices are neither rational nor careful. By studying decision-making in a simple nervous system (that of the medicinal leech), Dr. Kristan found suggestions for why this might be true: brains are general purpose devices that use the same nerve cells to perform very different behaviors. Since leeches face this problem with just 15,000 nerve cells, consider the complexity of making decisions with our brains, containing nearly a million billion nerve cells.
Dr. Kristan is a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He has served as the Director of the Neurosciences Graduate Program and Chair of the Neurobiology Section at UC-San Diego. Dr. Kristan’s research interests include the neuronal basis of behavior and behavioral choice, computational models of neuronal networks, and the development of neuronal circuits. His laboratory studies how networks of nerve cells produce different behaviors, and how these neuronal networks are established during embryogenesis. He is the author of more than 120 research articles. He has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Neuroscience, has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a Fellow of the University of Bielefeld in Germany.