Every Tuesday we show 3 TED Talks on our wall sized screen organized around a common theme.

This weeks theme: The Mind

Gero Miesenboeck reengineers a brain In the quest to map the brain, many scientists have attempted the incredibly daunting task of recording the activity of each neuron. Gero Miesenboeck works backward -- manipulating specific neurons to figure out exactly what they do, through a series of stunning experiments that reengineer the way fruit flies perceive light.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly engaging talk.

VS Ramachandran on your mind Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples.

Prioritize People Over Process: The Brain Science of Happy Agile Teams

Learn how to apply neuroscience and psychology to more effectively work with each other as a happy team that produces better software. You will take away:

• Concrete techniques for more quickly building trust on teams
• Actionable ideas for managing social stress
• Proven techniques for getting the best results from each other

Comments from the Game Developers Conference presentation of similar material:

"Mr. Scott Crabtree was also an absolutely excellent speaker - very inspiring, thought-provoking, and energizing! Please have him back on the same topic of the importance of happiness within teams in the future!"

"The speaker about happiness was amazing."

"Scott Crabtree was Excellent...an excellent tutorial that I would recommend to anyone."

Presenter:

Scott Crabtree, Chief Happiness Officer, Happy Brain Science: www.HappyBrainScience.com/about

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm and will run until 8:30.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of agile fluency

Are you interested in the brain, the mind, and the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology? We're in an amazing time of starting to understand some of the ways the brain works. Join us for a few videos and discussion about some of the most interesting new developments. Let's build a community of Neurogeeks here in Oregon!

Neurogeeks is a (now monthly!) meetup for people interested in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, technology and the mind. Our meetups address a range of related topics at a "TEDTalk" or Nova level of complexity. Our goal is to build a community of people interested in the brain in Portland.

This month, we'll be discussing various ways scientists and "life-hackers" are trying to enhance brain function and essentially make people "smarter." Lots of interesting avenues of discussion!

For more information, join the meetup and RSVP.

For our April meetup, speaker Lily Pacheko, the coordinator of SPARK at OHSU, a landmark autism research project across 21 clinical sites, will present a brief history of autism, autism research, and talk about the SPARK study.

SPARK stands for 'Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge,' and the mission is simple: to speed up research and advance our understanding of autism to help improve lives.

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder, refers to a range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication, as well as by unique strengths and differences. (read more).

Understanding autism gives us a greater understanding of the brain and how epigenetic factors like hormones in the womb affect our brains' development.

Lily Pacheco, MA. is the SPARK study coordinator at OHSU. For the past few years Lily has worked in diverse communities to recruit and collect data for numerous research studies. If you are interested in volunteering with SPARK through OHSU, contact Lily at (503) 949-6478 or email her at [email protected] to ask about volunteer opportunities.

Join and RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/NeuroGeeks-Neuroscience-Meetup-Group/events/238447403/

Wonder why we do what we do (or why OTHER people do what they do)? Andy from the Brain Science Seminar will be presenting about how motivation works in the brain.

f we were bold enough to attempt building a brain inside a computer, how much detail would our computer program require to pass as ‘convincingly intelligent’?

This should be a great meetup!

Interested in how neurons form and grow in the brain? Learn about the mechanics of brain development at Neurogeeks, a community of people interested in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience. Please RSVP at Meetup with the link here.

Interested in getting a scientific perspective on managing adult ADHD? Integrated Neurobiology is a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding the mind. Greg Crosby, author of Transforming ADHD will give this talk addressing how ADHD affects the mind and strategies that can help overcome distraction and re-focus attention.

Historically, the study of human consciousness was often considered to be outside the scope of scientific inquiry. Thanks to recent advances in brain imaging techniques and the development of various methods for manipulating consciousness in the lab, the scientific study of consciousness is now recognized as a mainstream topic of research within the cognitive neurosciences. In this talk Dr. Pitts will outline some of the recent progress in the field... Please RSVP at Meetup.com.

Join us to learn about how alcohol affects the brain's decision-making (spoiler alert: not so great decision-making can happen!) along with how sex differences in the brain may have an effect on how this plays out.

Neurogeeks May Meetup features Dr Serena Saturn from University of Portland. Learn how social connection impacts neurophysiology.

Hello, this is our monthly informal meetup for the Portland QS community. The idea is for us to get together and talk about what we are working on and learning from our data and self-experiments.

There won't be formal talks, but if you want to show others what you are working on, there will be a projector on hand.

Food and drinks are going to be potluck style. If you can, bring something that you can share with others. It doesn't need to be elaborate. A simple snack is great.

Looking forward to seeing what you are up to!

Calorie restriction has been associated with greater longevity, how does that affect the brain? Gail Stonebarger is currently collaborating with the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to determine whether calorie restriction (CR) of 30% is able to delay or slow brain aging in rhesus macaque monkeys. Previously, CR has been shown in various species to enhance cognition and metabolic function, extend lifespan, and, in this population, extend healthspan. In this talk, Gail will discuss normal and pathological brain aging, the unique population of very old monkeys housed at the NIA, what effects CR has on the brain, and will also include future directions of this research.

Hello, this is our monthly informal meetup for the Portland QS community. The idea is for us to get together and talk about what we are working on and learning from our data and self-experiments.

There won't be formal talks, but if you want to show others what you are working on, there will be a projector on hand.

Food and drinks are going to be potluck style. If you can, bring something that you can share with others. It doesn't need to be elaborate. A simple snack is great.

Looking forward to seeing what you are up to!

At our next meetup on June 11, Dr. John Harkness, a neuroscientist, will share insights on genetic predictors of drug preference, epigenetic responses to drug use, and neural mechanism of drug memory.

Note that we're in the new Vacasa building this month, located one block south of our old side, on Lovejoy between Johnson and Kearney. We need a volunteer to let people into the building, please let me know if you can help.

Please RSVP!

http://meetu.ps/e/GLw3f/12Ddh/d

Suicide is an evolutionary puzzle. Most theorists reasonably assume that suicide is a pathology or an unfortunate byproduct of one or several adaptations, but evolutionary theorists also recognize that increasing fitness can entail risks or come at the expense of survival. The bargaining model of suicidal behavior frames non-lethal attempts, which far outnumber completions, as costly signals of need in the face of severe fitness threats. Kristen and her colleagues tested this and other evolutionary models using data from 53 unique cultures. Forced or thwarted marriages, social condemnation, and the victim having committed a transgression were common precursors to lethal and non-lethal suicidal behavior. She will discuss the social conditions that commonly lead to suicidal behavior and how evolutionary theory can help make sense of the tragedy of self-inflicted death.

From an early age, humans learn that objects can be sorted into meaningful orderings. This might be on the basis of an obvious physical feature (like "size") or something more subtle and subjective (like "cost" or "preference"). A particular cognitive skill arises from this understanding: the ability to perform a transitive inference. Although long studied as a facet of human intelligence, many other species are also able to make this inference. When considering several different experimental manipulations, the best explanation for transitive inference in these species is a cognitive representation of order that can be reasoned about and manipulated as though it possesses spatial properties. This cognitive faculty has deep evolutionary roots that predate the talent for mathematical and linguistic abstraction that humans often take for granted. Simulations using a computational model that embodies this theory suggest new directions for the study of this fundamental cognitive mechanism.

Translating human emotions into the language of neurons is one of the fundamental challenges in affective neuroscience and critical for understanding the neuronal basis of many mental illnesses. But we currently have no quantitative understanding of how emotions emerge from the activity of neural networks in the brain. Capturing the essence of emotions with computational methods might seem like an oxymoron given lay conceptions of emotions as irrational forces that inflexibly bias behavior away from rationality. However, it is increasingly clear that the neural circuits mediating emotion and decision making are highly intertwined. After decades of research suggesting the amygdala mainly contributes to emotion and simpler forms of associative learning, researchers are just beginning to explore the computational boundaries of amygdala function. The emerging perspective, which Dr. Costa will discuss, is that the computational goals of emotional circuits in the brain are much richer than simply identifying things as good or bad.

Dr. Vinny Costa is an assistant professor in Department of Behavioral Neuroscience and in the Division of Neuroscience of the with the Oregon National Primate Research Center. Dr. Costa's research is focused on using computational approaches from reinforcement learning and decision making to understand the function of the mesolimbic circuits in emotion, cognition, and disease. To do this he takes a multidisciplinary approach combining computational modeling of behavior, neurophysiology, neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, and chemogenetic methodologies in rhesus macaques and humans.

Interested in learning more about the emerging understanding of glia in the brain? Dr. Kelly Monk, co-director of the Vollum Institute at OHSU will be sharing her research and highlighting the many functions glia are responsible, many of which are new discoveries.

Beginning before birth, human development takes place deeply embedded within a biobehavioral system with other conspecifics. The attachment bond that forms between the highly altricial infant and its caregiver not only ensures the infant's survival but is the critical context for the brain development that underpins executive function and self-regulation. Emerging research identifies how infant-caregiver neurobiological synchrony between helps shape this development and how early experiences marked by deprivation, adversity, and trauma influence mental and physical health across the lifespan. In this talk, Dr. Waters will discuss the neurobiology of attachment, the ways in which early experience gets under the skin, and what we can do about it.