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Friday Evening Lecture Series
08/06/04 (Lang Lecture)
The Influence of Behavior on Brain Structure and Function
Russell Fernald, Stanford University
Introduction by Jelle Atema, Boston University Marine Program
Lecture Abstract:
Clearly the brain controls behavior but can behavior also 'control' the brain? In evolution, selective ecological pressures clearly shaped the sensory and motor capacities as well as behavior and the body. And in development, behavior acts in concert with the environment to cause structural changes in the brain lasting a lifetime. Surprisingly, in 'real time' social behavior can also cause changes in the brains of some adult animals. Changes caused by behavioral interactions can be dramatic, and in many instances are related to reproductive behavior. Understanding how behavior sculpts the brain in the course of behavioral interactions is a major challenge. To analyze such changes requires a model system where the social environment can be controlled while allowing access to physiological, cellular, and molecular processes being regulated. I will describe how we study social influences on the brain, asking how does social information effect change in the brain and body? Animals must attend to the social scene to identify their chances. Learning how social information is transduced into cellular changes should help us understand how this happens in other social animals.
Russell Dawson Fernald is the Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology and a professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He served as the Director of the Human Biology Program there from 1996 to 2003. Dr. Fernald received his B.S. from Swarthmore College in 1963 and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. He completed his Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neurophysiology at Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry in Munich in 1971, and was a scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute for Behavioral Physiology until 1976. Dr. Fernald was an NIH Fogarty Research Scientist with the Medical Research Council for Cell Biophysics in London from 1984 to 1985 and has held various professorships, including positions at the University of Oregon (where he was the Director of the Institute of Neuroscience from 1986 to 1990), the University of Colorado Medical School, and the University of California at San Francisco. He was also an instructor in the MBL’s Neural Systems and Behavior Course from 1987 to 1990. His professional activities include editorial and advisory positions with journals such as Neurobiology and Behavior Monographs, Brain Behavior and Evolution, and the Journal of Comparative Physiology. Dr. Fernald has also served as a panel member for the National Eye Institute (NEI), the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD) and panel chairman and site visitor for the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, an AAAS Fellowship, the Rank Prize in Vision/Opto-electronics, and several Stanford University teaching awards.
Jelle Atema received graduate degrees in sensory biology and physics in 1966 from the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, and his Ph.D. in sensory biology from the University of Michigan in 1969. Dr. Atema came to Woods Hole in 1970 as Assistant Scientist in the Chemistry department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 1974 he joined the Boston University Marine Program, first as Associate Professor, then as Professor and as its Director since 1990. He is also a Research Fellow at Boston University's Cognitive Neuroscience Department. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship. Dr. Atema is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and inaugurated the First Annual Distinguished Lecture in Marine Neurosciences at the University of Miami in 2000. Dr. Atema has served the MBL as course director and on many committees including the Board of Trustees (1985-1993) and currently the Science Council. He is known for his work in Sensory Biology of Aquatic Animals and for his reconstructions of paleolithic flutes. He was a student of the late Jean-Pierre Rampal, the French flute master who joined Dr. Atema on the Lillie Auditorium stage in 1988 for a performance of the MBL-Suite by Woods Hole composer Ezra Laderman commissioned for the MBL Centennial.
About the Lang Lecture
The annual Lang Lecture is held in memory of Dr. Fred Lang, a neurobiologist with the Boston University Marine Program at the MBL who was killed tragically in an automobile accident in December 1978.
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