Recent global strategic initiatives on human brain have prompted policy makers to develop medium to long-term views and an analysis of future research developments with the aim of defining research agendas in neuroscience and cognitive science. With all ongoing efforts from Iranian neuroscientists, this has recently been the case in our community as well. As with all strategic activities, the I...

Serotonin is a highly ubiquitous signaling molecule that plays a role in the regulation of various physiological functions. Several lines of evidence, including the present work from Hsiao and colleagues, demonstrate that, in the gut, microbial-derived metabolites affect the production of serotonin that in turn impacts host physiological functions.

Presumably, second-language (L2) learning is mediated by changes in the brain. Little is known about what changes in the brain, how the brain changes, or when these changes occur during learning. Here, we illustrate by way of example how modern brain-based methods can be used to discern some of the changes that occur during L2 learning. Preliminary results from three studies indicate that class...

We investigate the use of information from all second order derivatives of the error function to perform network pruning (i.e., removing unimportant weights from a trained network) in order to improve generalization and increase the speed of further training. Our method, Optimal Brain Surgeon (OBS), is significantly better than magnitude-based methods, which can often remove the wrong weights. ...

The enteric nervous system (ENS) in our gastrointestinal tract, nicknamed the “second brain”, is responsible for normal gut function and peristaltic contraction. Embryonic development of the ENS involves the colonization of the gut wall from one end to the other by a population of proliferating neural crest (NC) cells. Failure of these cells to invade the whole gut results in the relatively com...

Time perception in the range of milliseconds to a few seconds is essential for many important sensory and perceptual tasks including speech perception, motion perception, motor coordination, and cross-modal interaction. For the brain to be in synchrony with the environment, the physical differences in the speeds of light and sound, as well as stimuli from other modalities such as odors, must be...