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MRI brain

Project Overview

 
  • How does the evolutionary process of trial-and-error combinatorics produce the physiological functions that provide the feedback of an appropriate behavior in the environment?
  • In other words, how does the neural circuitry, such as reflex circuitry, form from the behavioral appropriateness in the environment? How does this "appropriateness" get inherited in the next generation in the evolutionary process?

Rationale

 
  • Inherited traits are adaptations that are similar to adaptation in learning, yet the mechanisms for establishing the adaptation is totally different.
  • Inheritance is based on a feedforward system whereas learning is based on a feedback system. Our goal is to find the similarities and differences between the two mechanisms of adaptation.

Research Objectives

 
  • We will compare and contrast the difference between the feedback and feedforward systems, and identify how the feedback system in physiological adaptation interacts with the feedforward system in inheritance.

Specific Goals

 
  • Determine what are the crucial factors for switching from modifiable adaptive learned system to consolidation into fixed hardwire system.

The Challenge

 
  • What are the criteria for this switching to occur so that the temporary learned system acquired in an organism can pass onto the next generation as hardwire circuitry?
  • That is, how does innate behavior capture by organisms?
  • How does an organism know what to pass onto the next generation?

The Solutions

 
  • Determine the learning rate parameters