UCLA CENTER FOR COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
A Proposal to Unify the Study of Mind and Brain at UCLA

MISSION

The workings of the human mind will always be a seductive and challenging topic for human inquiry. How do our emotional states affect decision making? How do we perceive and estimate time? How do visualize mental images? How can we “inherit” a mental disease? How does learning alter perception? Until recently, mental processes have been studied primarily through analysis of behavior; this is the traditional domain of “cognitive science.” Few would doubt, however, that the brain is the organ of cognition but neuroscience, the “wet” science of the brain, has had few tools available to probe the activities of the brain that form our mental life. A seemingly impermeable, though clearly artificial barrier has separated the human mind and brain; this barrier, however, is now beginning to fall.

Using highly sophisticated instrumentation, scientists are now able to observe the activity in the human brain with high sensitivity and with high spatial and temporal resolution. In the dozen years since its invention, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has allowed cognitive scientists to relate the engagement of specific brain regions to the mental processes of human subjects. It forms a “crack in the armor” that separates mind and brain. It has moved the domains of cognitive science towards physiology and of neuroscience towards the study of cognition. The merged discipline, cognitive neuroscience, will be among the most significant of human research activities for years to come

UCLA is already among world-leading institutions in cognitive science. Cognitive neuroscience is fundamentally interdisciplinary, demanding sophistication in cognitive science and neurobiology, and thereby necessitates an intimate interaction among researchers whose traditional backgrounds are in both the psychological and biological sciences. The methods required for interrogation of the human brain in vivo are at the cutting edge of technology and require a coordinated development of resources and infrastructure based on state-of-the-art physics, engineering, and computation. Coupling an extraordinary faculty of researchers in cognition with an internationally acknowledged program in neuroimaging, UCLA workers have made groundbreaking discoveries in the cognition, perception, psychiatric disorders, surgical treatment of the brain, memory, language, and emotion, to name but a few. This has been possible because of a strong spirit of collaboration that exists between the cognitive investigators and the physicists who are able to push the technologies to meet the research needs.

These highly productive researchers now recognize the need for an integrated program to continue to define and explore the cutting edge of cognitive neuroscience and have proposed the establishment of a UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience which will provide a centralized structure for interdisciplinary research and a nexus for collaborations across campus. By integrating activities in cognitive science, engineering, physiology and computation, this center will advance the behavioral and instrumentation technologies in cognitive neuroscience to the very limits of physical possibility, and through its focus on education will train the investigators who will lead the future of cognitive neuroscience.

A Vision of the UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience

As a physical structure, the new center will house both core faculty and instrumentation for research. Academically, the faculty will have homes in psychology, psychiatry, neurology, engineering and physics with the center providing a nexus for truly interdisciplinary collaboration. The center will accept trainees at the undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral levels from each of these academic entities as well, allowing students to explore these truly novel areas of research while enjoying the support of their traditional departmental homes. It will use its own scientific results to develop new strategies in education.

Technological innovation will be a key focus of the new center. As such, the center will aggressively pursue industrial partnerships. The core researchers already enjoy close and enthusiastic support from Siemens Medical Solutions – the world’s leading manufacturer of MRI devices, Apple Computer, and a host of smaller companies that provide enabling technologies for neuroimaging research. The group is also pursuing patent applications for devices that have been locally created for this research and intends to see these developed by industrial partners.

Specifically, the center will include a next-generation magnetic resonance imaging device designed and built especially for the center’s work. The instrument will be the highest resolution human imaging device. It will incorporate capabilities, including concurrent electrical measurement of brain activity unavailable anywhere else in the world. This will be the second generation of fMRI devices designed by faculty at UCLA and will be constructed in intimate partnership with the MR instrument vendor

The center will house advanced computing facilities. The new science of the mind now requires the capability to perform massive pattern recognition searches of the four dimensional MRI raw data. These are exceedingly taxing analyses that strain the capabilities of conventional computers. Further, the study of brain connectivity and changes in physical configuration with development necessitate computation of the dynamics of three and four dimensional variation and must be expressed in the form of statistical tests. Finally, the MR instrument itself will have a data rate almost two orders of magnitude higher than conventional scanners to enable its extraordinary resolution. To meet all of these challenges, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience will install a supercomputing cluster consisting of at least 64 separate high end computing units and will develop the programs needed to use these to full advantage.

The Center for Cognitive Neuroscience will include psychophysical and behavioral testing facilities. These are essential for the understanding and modeling of behavior whose physiology will be the subject of our scrutiny. This lab space will offer shared support for the research of all of the core investigators. As time evolves this will surely grow to include electroencephalographic recording and other means of data acquisition.

Within the center there will be shared space for device construction and testing and for the staff who will provide technical, engineering and computing support. Technologically advanced conference and teaching space will be created to support the many outreach and teaching activities of the center.

The present core members of the Center include Robert Bilder, Susan Bookheimer, Tyrone Cannon, Mark Cohen, Stephen Engel, Barbara Knowlton, Matthew Lieberman, Russell Poldrack, Ladan Shams and Paul Thompson, collectively representing the departments of Biomedical Physics, Psychiatry, Psychology, Neurology, and Radiological Sciences. More than 20 additional faculty members from a half dozen departments have expressed their interest in being involved in this new interdisciplinary center.

[ Faculty ]