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- Welcome, we are very glad to see you here today.
I'm Nick Spitzer, Co-Director of the Kavli Institute
for Brain and Mind, here in La Jolla,
and we have a wonderful program this afternoon.
We're very happy that you're here to take it all in.
I want to say a few words
about the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind as we start.
In the little over a decade that we've been in business,
we have been trying to bridge across different disciplines
associated with understanding the brain.
And so, as you can see, here, we are trying
to bring together people interested in cognitive science,
psychology, on the one hand,
with neuroscientists and neurologists, on the other hand,
to bridge what has often been a set of silos
separating the people,
of course all concerned with the same subject
and Rusty Gage, Fred Gage, here, joins me
as Co-Director of the KIBM;
Ralph Greenspan is our Associate Director.
Since the announcement of the BRAIN Initiative
in April 2013, the KIBM has launched a series
of further initiatives, which are illustrated here,
beginning with the Center for Brain Activity Mapping.
One of the big threads of the BRAIN Initiative is
to develop new technologies
with which to map the connections within the brain
and this has been the focus
of the Center for Brain Activity Mapping.
In addition, Ralph Greenspan has reached North to Sacramento
to the Legislature there and achieved funding
in the State Budget of the State of California
for Cal-BRAIN, again, a neurotechnology program
for the, now, entire state of California.
Most recently, the San Diego Brain Consortium,
here in San Diego, has worked to bring together people
from across the San Diego region
to work on understanding the brain with new technology.
In each of these cases, the goals are achieved
by providing grants to bring together people
and motivate them to work on these projects.
The whole process is made possible by The Kavli Foundation
to which we are very grateful.
They, as many of you will know, have been instrumental
in pushing forward scientific research in a number of fields
noted here in addition to neuroscience.
I should add that they also fund some very exciting prizes
every other year and we're very pleased
that one of the Co-Chairs of the Symposium today
is Carla Shatz who was a winner
of the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience earlier this year.
Bob Conn, Robert Conn, formerly a Professor and Dean here
at the University of California San Diego, is now
President of the Kavli Foundation,
Miyoung Chun is the Executive Vice President
for Scientific Programs and, together, the two of them
have done a great deal to push forward scientific research
across a wide range of disciplines.
I want to add that the structure of this symposium is
based on a series of symposia
that have been going on for a long time.
This afternoon, we are here together
for the inaugural Kavli Symposium presented by the KIBM,
but the CARTA Symposia,
which I know are familiar to a number of you,
have really been a wonderful model
for what we are doing here together today
and they are focused on answering
some of the big questions about human beings:
Where did we come from?
How did we get here?
Ajit Varki, Fred Gage, Margaret Schoeninger
and Pascal Gagneux run these symposia
and we're very happy to acknowledge
their participation in helping us with our inaugural event.
This brings us, then, to the program for today,
the influence of early experience
on the organization and function of the adult brain.
This is a subject that's of great interest
to everyone in the audience and maybe there'll be
some reflection back on our origins at earlier times.
There was a point early in my career
in which we thought that the brain could be understood
either as some aspects
regulated by genes and genetic programs,
whereas other aspects of the brain's operation were
regulated by activity, electrical activity,
and, now, we appreciate and I think
this will be richly illustrated today,
that genes and activity are very much partners
with one another.
Nature and nurture are, in fact, combined in these studies.
So, here will be some of the questions
that we will be addressing
during the course of the afternoon.
How do the events of early development show up?
What are the risks and opportunities of early development
and their consequences for adult behavior?
And, finally, does identification of some critical windows
at early stages of development provide opportunities
for us to reopen those windows at a later stage in life?
So, with that, I'll turn the microphone over
to Terry Sejnowski who will give us a brief introduction
for the opening of the afternoon.
- We have a great group here, today, of speakers
and a wonderful audience, so I'm really looking forward
to all the talks.
I want to, first of all, welcome you
on behalf of the Salk Institute,
Rusty Gage, my colleague who is a Co-Director of KIBM,
and I'm also on the faculty here and at UCSD.
So, one of the great privileges of being here at the Salk
was the beginning to know Francis Crick
and Francis told me this story, once,
and I think it might be a good way to get the Symposium
off to, on the right foot.
He was giving a talk to a lay audience
and the question period came up
and one of the ladies in the front row put her hand up
and said, "Professor Crick, could you tell me,
"what's the most exciting thing,
"discovery that's been made in neuroscience?"
And, Francis thought for a moment and said,
"Well, I think the most exciting thing that I can think of
"is that neuroscience has discovered
"that the brain is plastic," and she fainted straight away
(audience laughing)
and that's really a, that's really the crucial mechanism
for learning and memory is the fact that the brain really is
responsive to things, experiences you have
and, as you'll see, not just during the day,
but also at night.
Now, we've picked speakers
to give you a broad spectrum,
all the way from the molecules up to, you know,
the whole coordinated central nervous system
that is responsible for all the behaviors you have,
all the thoughts that you have
and the, you know, your hopes and aspirations
and that's really, again, what Francis was,
tried to get across in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis.
Another incident,
this is Ramachandran, who is a colleague at, now, at UCSD
and is also a very, very prominent neuroscientist,
once got a call from Francis.
Francis was writing his book and Francis says this,
"Rama, I have just gotten back from my editor,
"you know, marked up first chapters
"and she said that I ought to give it to a layman to read
"and get a feedback from a layman.
"Do you know any laymen?"
(audience laughing)
So, we're going to make an effort to try
to make our, the science as accessible as possible.
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