NFX #60: Perceiving the World Through our Ears w/ Santiago Jaramillo

Santiago Jaramillo is an assistant professor in the University of Oregon's Biology department and is the head of the Jaralab, a neuroscience lab studying auditory cognition in mice.

Professor Jaramillo and his team study the neural circuits that mediate auditory cognition. Their goal is to understand how we assign meaning to sounds, how we attend to sounds or ignore them, how we remember them, and how disorders of the brain can affect these processes.

Of particular interest in their research is how our responses to sounds can change depending on context, a phenomenon called behavioral flexibility. Behaving appropriately after changes in context requires that organisms rapidly modify their expectations, associations between cues and rewards, or attentional state. 

http://jaralab.uoregon.edu