These are exciting times for brain scientists: thanks to powerful new techniques, we have a chance of understanding how populations of neurons work in concert to produce behavior. These techniques combine next-generation electrical probes with virtual reality, powerful optics, and genetic engineering. In this broad lecture, I will illustrate how these techniques are allowing our laboratory to probe how the brain of mice sees, decides, and navigates. I will then focus on a classic question originally posed, as it happens, by scientists in Israel: if we picture a population of neurons as being an orchestra, are the individual neurons akin to choristers who join in the main tune, or to soloists who play their own tune? I will show how our laboratory answered this question thanks to a brilliant young scientist who, as it happens, is also from Israel, and thanks to the powerful new techniques available today to brain science.

This Heller lecture is available to watch online HERE