Stanford neurobiologist to give Hille Lecture on brain circuits and perception

William Newsome

Dr. William Newsome, professor of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, will present the eighth annual Einar Hille Memorial Lecture in Neurosciences, sponsored by the Department of Physiology and Biophysics.

He will speak on ³ Interpreting Sensory Maps within the Brain: From Neural Circuits to Perceptual Decisions² at 3:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 5, in room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center.

Newsome's research focuses on brain mechanisms responsible for visual perception. Our visual experience results from the brain's ability to interpret streams of electrical events, termed action potentials, in the 3 million optic nerve fibers that link the eyes to the centeral nervous system.

This visual information reaches a network of more than 30 visual areas within the occipital, temporal and parietal lobes of the brain's cerebral cortex. Ultimately, neural processing within these areas results in visual perception and multiple forms of visually based cognition, such as attention, short-term memory and decision making.

Neuroscientists would like to know how information about the external world is encoded in the streams of action portetials. What is the functional significance of neurons in the visual cortex that respond selectively to stimulus orientation, direction of motion, binocular disparity or color? How is the activity of cortical neurons related to what an animal perceives? How is the information carried by cortical neurons interpreted to inform decisions about behavior?

To address such issues, Newsome and his colleagues conduct simultaneous behavioral and psyciological experiments in animals trained to perform carefully selected visual discrimination tasks. By recording the activity of cortical neurons during behavior, Newsome has exposed many facets of the relationship between neural activity and an animal's perceptual judgments about what it sees.

Newsome is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in addition to his faculty position at Stanford. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Stetson University and a Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology. After postdoctoral training at Cal Tech and the National Eye Institute, he was a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before moving to Stanford in 1988.

He has received several honors, including the Rank Prize in optoelectronics and the Spencer Award form the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and has lectured around the world.

The Einar Hille Memorial Lecture in Neuroscience was established in 1991 by Kristi Hille in honor of her late husband. Professor Hille was a mathematician at Yale University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His son, Dr. Bertil Hille, is a professor of physiology and biophysics at the UW. ¶