Biography
Joshua Trachtenberg’s research seeks to understand how sensory experiences are written into the fabric of our brains. Genetics plays a dominant role in wiring together the connections between neurons that establish neural circuitry. After we are born, our brains are bombarded with information from the world around us. This sensory information changes neural circuitry, allowing us to learn a language, perform complex visual discrimination, obtain sophisticated motor skills, and learn the subtleties of social interactions. How this external sensory information instructs neural circuitry is not known. Given its centrality to complex thought, tackling this question is of some significance. The Trachtenberg lab employs a sophisticated array of vital imaging and physiological tools to reveal the richness and mechanisms of this experience-dependent plasticity.