For the next six weeks I'll be staying in sunny southern California to perform experiments in Bill Kristan's lab at UCSD. I'll be working on the neurobiological basis of decision making in leeches. Specifically, I'll be working with a preparation of the isolated leech nervous system that responds either with a crawling motor pattern or with a swimming motor pattern to always the same stimulus, in an unpredictable manner. I first heard of this phenomenon in Kevin Briggman's Science paper and thought it would be a great idea to see if there was a way to condition the nervous system, such that it would bias it's decisions towards oe or the other of the two motor patterns. If this worked, we could use optical imaging of nervous activity to watch the nervous system learn from operant feedback - no preparation in the world can do this at the moment.

I hope to have enough time to document the experiments and blog about the progression of the project. Wish me luck!