Northwest Labs B103 and Zoom
Title:
On Sleep, Camouflage and Brain Evolution
Abstract:
I will describe recent work on two systems and at different levels of investigation. In the first I will describe the unexpected dynamic complexity of sleep activity in the brain of a reptile. In the second, I will describe experiments on camouflage behavior in cuttlefish, an animal that exploits a unique skin display system controlled by the brain to match the texture statistics of visual scenes. Such studies, in animals that diverged over 320 and 550 MYA respectively from our own lineage, force one to reflect on the nature of common principles of brain operations.