While researching the underpinnings of how insect brains process decision-making, Caltech researcher Floris Van Breugel upended former scientific consensus that fruit flies avoid CO2. Van Breugel works in Michael Dickinson’s Lab at Caltech. Dickinson is an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.   Read more on Caltech’s website

To provide navigational help for the blind, Caltech researchers have combined augmented reality hardware and computer vision algorithms to create a portable headset that translates the optical world into plain English audio. The work was done in the laboratory of Markus Meister (Ph.D. ’87) who is an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute […]

Caltech researchers have identified a small cluster of neurons in the male Drosophilia fruit fly brain that governs “threat displays,” the aggressive behaviors which are seen in countless organisms preceding conflict. Their work provides a starting point that may lead to greater understanding of threatening behaviors and aggression in humans.   Read more on Caltech’s […]

TCCI®-affiliated faculty member, Sarkis Mazmanian have made an interesting discovery between the microbiome and locomotion in flies. Warm, protected and full of nutrients – the tiny intestines of a fruit fly are a perfect habitat for some bacteria. These bacteria, in turn, help the fly break down and digest food, keeping the insect’s metabolism running […]

If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a lengthy restaurant menu and been completely unable to decide what to order for lunch, you have experienced what psychologists call choice overload. Colin Camerer, Caltech’s Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair has just released new […]

Michael Dickinson, an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, and two of his colleagues recently discovered that, similar to nautical navigators of old, fruit flies use celestial cues like the sun to navigate in straight lines.   Read more on the Caltech website here.

The laboratory of Mikhail Shapiro, assistant professor of chemical engineering and an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, is showing how scientists and doctors might, in the future, use new noninvasive techniques for controlling brain circuits to help treat neurological conditions such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.   […]

Ralph Adolphs, Director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, together with researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno has shown that their new computing tool can predict a person’s intelligence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their resting state brain activity. Functional MRI develops a map of brain activity by […]

Scientists at Caltech have, for the first time, induced natural sensations in the arm of a paralyzed man by stimulating a certain region of the brain with a tiny array of electrodes. The work could one day allow paralyzed people using prosthetic limbs to feel physical feedback from sensors placed on these devices.   The […]

Watch this interview with Joe Parker, an entomologist, assistant professor of biology and affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. Joe ‘s decades-long fascination with bugs and beetles led him to study a particular species of beetle that might help us answer some of the fundamental questions of evolution.   […]