Physiology

Systems Neuroscience
  • Professor: Masaki Tanaka
  • Assistant Professor: Takanobu Yamanobe
  • Assistant Professor: Sergey A. Kurkin
  • Assistant Professor: Jun Kunimatsu
  • Phone: +81-11-706-5040
  • FAX: +81-11-706-5041
The cognition and volitional action require fairly complex neural processes. Clinical observations and recent imaging studies have shown that, even when we make a single eye movement, many brain areas in the cerebral cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, thalamus, and brainstem are critically involved. Although much is known about the connections between these structures and the intrinsic local circuits, little is known about how these areas interact with each other to integrate signals arising from multiple sources for coherent percept and appropriate actions. For better understanding of the function of the brain, we take a systems level approach with a variety of techniques.

Research

The aim of our research is to understand how our perception and behavior are regulated by signals in individual neurons, local networks, and the brain systems. For this goal, we conduct single neuron recordings, local pharmacological applications, and electrical stimulation in behaving monkeys, psychophysical assessment of humans, as wells as computational analyses of models that are based on biological observations. In particular, we are interested in voluntary control of eye movements and related brain functions. Eye movements exhibit properties such as sensorimotor transformation, movement decision, learning, and memory that can be generalized to other systems. On the other hand, their reproducibility allows us to perform extensive quantitative analyses and modeling, and most of the brainstem control of eye movements has already been uncovered. By taking advantage of the system, we explore the functions of higher brain areas such as the cerebral cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum and thalamus. Our ongoing projects include neural mechanisms for spatial attention, interval timing, adaptive motor learning, predictive motor controls, rule-based response selection, as well as generic information coding by the population of neurons.

Education

Faculty members in this laboratory give classes of Neurophysiology, Physiology Practice, and Medical Research Practice for medical students. We also take part in the courses of Physiology and Neuroscience for graduate students, and the course of Health and Society for the first grade undergraduate students. Almost all of these classes are given in Japanese, while only a few are given in English. We accept applications of young prospective researchers who take master (2 years) or doctoral (4 years) courses to learn the Systems Neuroscience in our laboratory.

Courses in English

Not available

Number of Students from Abroad

Current: 1

Recent 5 years: 1
Fig1 Fig2
Fig3
Fig4
1 Probing and disturbing signals in the cerebellum during ocular tracking.
2 Neural correlates of subjective time in single thalamic neurons.
3 Computational analysis seeking for information carrier in neural spikes.
4 Lab members celebrated inauguration of Prof. Tanaka in Dec. 2010.

International Activities

Recent Invited Talks in International Conferences
  • Tanaka M (2011) David Mahoney Center Laboratory Seminar, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY.
  • Tanaka M (2010) The 11th Workshop on the Mechanisms of Brain and Mind, Sapporo.
  • Tanaka M (2009) The 8th Biennial Meeting of Chinese Society for Neuroscience, Guangzhou, China.
  • Tanaka M (2009) The 19th Annual Meeting of Neural Control of Movement, Waikoloa, Hawaii.
  • Tanaka M (2008) HFSP International Workshop, OIST, Okinawa.

Ongoing International Collaborations
T. Yamanobe is continuously collaborating with Dr. Khashayar Pakdaman at CNRS/Universite Paris 7 since 2002.

Selected Publications

1. Kunimatsu J, Tanaka M (2010) Roles of the primate motor thalamus in the generation of antisaccade. J Neurosci 30: 5108-5117.
2. Yoshida A, Tanaka M (2009) Enhanced modulation of neuronal activity during antisaccades in the primate globus pallidus. Cereb Cortex 19: 206-217.
3. Tanaka M (2007) Cognitive signals in the primate motor thalamus predict saccade timing. J Neurosci 27: 12109-12118.
4. Tanaka M (2006) Inactivation of the central thalamus delays self-timed saccades. Nature Neurosci 9: 20-22.
5. Fukushima K, Yamanobe T, Shinmei Y, Fukushima J, Kurkin S, Peterson BW (2002) Coding of smooth eye movements in three dimensional space by frontal cortex. Nature 419: 157-162.
6. Tanaka M, Lisberger SG (2001) Regulation of the gain of visually guided smooth pursuit eye movements by frontal cortex. Nature 409: 191-194.