When
Where
Announcing:
Stephen Cowen, Ph.D.
Cognition & Neural Systems (CNS) program, Psychology department, University of Arizona
Brain-body coordination in health, aging, and Parkinson’s disease
The 85 billion neurons in the human brain coordinate their activities with millisecond-level precision to enable learning, navigation, and motor control. Our research seeks to understand how such coordination emerges and how it changes with aging, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson’s disease.
In the first half of the talk, I will describe our work investigating how oscillatory activity in the rodent hippocampus supports spatial navigation, synchronizes with body and limb movements, and changes with age. We will also explore how aging impacts the capacity of hippocampal place cells to represent locations in space, providing clues as to how aging shapes our capacity to navigate.
The second half of the talk will focus on Parkinson’s disease, a condition characterized by the death of dopamine-producing neurons and profound abnormalities in neural synchrony. Here, I will discuss our efforts to understand and develop treatments for levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID), a debilitating condition associated with the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. An exciting observation from our experiments is that sub-anesthetic ketamine reduces LID, abolishes LID-associated patterns of hypersynchrony, and profoundly reconfigures interactions between cortical neurons to potentially restore their capacity to control movement.
Please Note:
This colloquium will be offered in person only (ILC 141).
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Updated: 09/17/26