UC Merced researchers study the brain from all angles

The very idea of a purple zebra is odd – outside reality as we know it. But it is not beyond the capability of our minds to imagine and picture such a mythical creature.

The human brain can take two disparate concepts in our memories and connect and combine them in milliseconds. The speed and smoothness are so remarkable that even a supercomputer – if it had emotions – would be jealous.

The interaction of brain biology and lifelong personal experience has compelling scientific as well as social implications. That mixture fascinates researchers in UC Merced’s Cognitive and Information Sciences program.

In fact, it forms the basis of much of their work. And as a result of their varied interests and projects, the campus has emerged as a nationally well-regarded center of research about the brain and cognition.

Merced scholars are investigating how the mind operates in the world and how we should approach – excuse the pun – the heady task of thinking about thinking.

So how does a purple zebra work?

Neural pathways in the prefrontal cortex signal circuits further back in the brain, tap the knowledge stored there and combine chunks of information efficiently, said Professor David Noelle, who studies such brain functions and constructs computer simulations of them.

The brain “very flexibly recombines parts of old ideas to create new ideas,” Noelle explained. His research focuses in part on how neurons within stripes of tissues in the prefrontal cortex “mutually excite each other” and “talk to each other.”

Information about “purpleness” and “zebraness” appear throughout the brain but signals from the prefrontal cortex “bind” them together so we can entertain a novel idea.

But the ability to do that, Noelle emphasized, depends on reusing and combining parts of past learning and experiences.

So a stunted childhood without an enriching learning environment could cause problems later on; it might be difficult for such an adult to be creative, to comprehend new situations and to adjust behavior to match changing circumstances, he said.

Noelle and a dozen of his colleagues are part of a tradition that dates back to ancient philosophers theorizing about the soul. However, today’s faculty researchers work in a 21st-century scientific universe of brain scans, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.

Without a medical school and hospital to provide an immediate entrée to clinical research, UC Merced decided from its founding not to compete with such neuroscience powerhouses as UC San Diego; instead, university pioneers opted for a more computational emphasis in brain research and an interdisciplinary format, with a lot of connections to computer science and engineering.

And the program is anchored in the somewhat contrarian ethos that the mind arises from more than just the physical organ of the brain – it also critically depends on the rest of the body, the outer world and possibly even other people.

Free of the traditional departmental constraints at older schools, the UC system’s newest campus has brought together philosophers, linguistics experts, artificial intelligence engineers, psychologists, neuroscientists and others under a big and porous tent. Another dozen or so faculty outside the CIS program also participate in the work.

Their overall collaboration and communication promise to create some new ideas, not unlike a purple zebra.

This story was originally published June 3, 2016 at 12:07 PM with the headline "UC Merced researchers study the brain from all angles."