Topic: Natural Behaviour

Nachum Ulanovsky discusses studying nervous systems during natural behaviour. The conversation considers what researchers gain from observing animals in ecologically meaningful conditions and how new methods can connect neuroscience with evolution and ecology.

Natural behaviour is organized hierarchically into mutually exclusive modules (like feeding or escaping) with sequences of finer behavioural submodules (like object-manipulation or run-initiation) progressively nested within, down to elementary motor actions[1]. Theoretical work proposes that the brain represents natural behaviour through nested attractor networks[2]. Experimentally testing this theory requires simultaneous recording of neural activity from multiple brain regions and behaviour as they unfold. This is challenging due to complexities in a) mimicking natural settings-including la