The Canadian Association for Neuroscience (CAN) and the Canadian Institutes of Health’s Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction (CIHR-INMHA) are proud to announce the winners of the 2019 Brain Star Awards.

See all the winner profiles here

This is a tragic and painful time for the Black community all over the world, including here in Canada. The Canadian Association for Neuroscience condemns racism in all its forms. The tragic death of George Floyd and many others obligate all of us to reflect on important questions about systemic forms of racism present in our society today. (more…)

It has long been appreciated that sensory experience helps to refine the connectivity of the brain during development.  In 1949, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb proposed that when different brain cells were consistently active at the same time as one another and acted in synchrony, the connections they formed would be strengthened as a result of their cooperation.  This so-called “Hebb rule” for circuit remodeling is sometimes restated as “cells that fire together, wire together.”, and helps explain how the wiring of the brain could be fine-tuned in response to sensory input. Fast forward 70 years and many of the artificial neural networks we rely on today to make accurate predictions from large datasets rely on digital implementations of various learning rules, including variants of Hebb’s rule, that underlie their ability to learn associations.  (more…)

UCalgary researchers discover that a group of ancient cells may play a key role in controlling stress

Stress is ubiquitous, and at no time in recent memory has this been more evident than right now — on a global scale. Our survival depends on our ability to continually adjust and respond to ever-evolving challenges in our world.

Interestingly, how we manage stress now has implications for how we will manage stress in the future. It is not necessarily about the actions we take now, but rather whether we feel our actions give us some control over the outcome during a difficult time. Psychologists and neuroscientists have pondered this ‘stress control’ theory for decades, but how the brain intertwines the perception of controllability of one situation into decisions and actions for future situations has not been well understood. (more…)