Biography

Sam Reiter is currently an Associate Professor and head of the Computational Neuroethology Unit at the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology (OIST). He did PhD work at Brown University and the US National Institutes of Health, and postodoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. His research interests center around understanding general principles of animal behavior and its neural basis, combining experimental and computational approaches. His lab currently focuses on studying coleoid cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, and squid), animals with a range of fascinating and unique behaviors, large and nearly unexplored brains, and which live in greater variety around Okinawa than anywhere else in the world. Recent and ongoing work concerns visual perception, sleep, motor control, and collective behavior. 

Talk Title: Exploring the brains of emerging model organisms with Neuropixels 

High-density electrophysiology has expanded the study of neural populations beyond traditional model organisms, enabling rapid advances in our understanding of understudied nervous systems. I will describe our recent work establishing Neuropixels recordings in cephalopods, a group of large-brained marine invertebrates whose neural activity remains largely unexplored in vivo. Recordings from individual neurons have allowed us to investigate how the squid brain processes light intensity and polarization, and how these two dimensions of visual information are integrated. We have also used this approach to reveal wake-like neural activity during active sleep in octopuses. Finally, I will introduce our ongoing work on higher-order visual processing in cuttlefish.