Florian Engert

It's a really cool demonstration of how behavioral states can influence and modulate sensory receptivity, and it allows one to speculate why it might be an advantage to extract socially relevant features while swimming at a smore stable constant velocity.

Specifically, Roy could show that adult medaka respond much more reliably to neighbors when they swim at constant speed, that they are less responsive during accelerations, and that they care very little during decelerations.

Here is the link to a paper that just came out on "Social interactions in medaka". sciencedirect.com/science/articl… It's a story that was spearheaded by Roy Harpaz, where he looked into the fish's sensitivity to social cues, and how this sensitivity depends on the current swim state.

How much do we *really* learn? In @NatRevNeurosci with @EngertLab and @AFerreiraCastro, we address why most of you humans firmly believe that patterned activity plays a necessary and instructive role in shaping neural circuits. nature.com/articles/s4158…

This mechanistic reductionist approach allows us now to make explicit predictions about the underlying neural circuits in the visuomotor processing stream, and thereby guide future whole-brain imaging and neural recording experiments to get at the underlying neural circuits.

This modeling framework accurately captures our behavior findings, and allows us to make novel behavioral predictions that we confirm in subsequent experiments.

Check out the latest project that came out of the phenomenally productive collaboration that Roy Harpaz (@RoyHarpaz) has initiated a few years ago by bridging the joint expertises of @engertlab and the team of Mark Fishman (also here at Harvard).

Nature Over Nurture: Functional Neuronal Circuits Emerge in the Absence of Developmental Activity [Engert Lab] @EngertLab @GregorFPS @bdanubius mcb.harvard.edu/department/new…

Now out in @NatureComms, our paper on activity- and experience- independent maturation of sensorimotor behaviors in zebrafish. @GregorFPS @EngertLab Since the preprint, we added new experiments confirming the effect and washout of anesthesia 👇 nature.com/articles/s4146…

This has become one of my favorite papers. We're very VERY far away from understanding how the brain works. thelancet.com/journals/lance…

@DulacLab @harvardbrainsci @MCB_Harvard @EngertLab @BOlveczky Great article! Bon voyage @BOlveczky and @EngertLab (love the t-shirt). Impressive challenge.

The true star and hero of the story is Kumaresh Krishnan who defended his PhD recently with this project and a few others of similar impact and excitement 😁😁

while ‘competence’ is influenced mainly by the environment in which fish are raised. A link to a preprint copy is here researchgate.net/publication/37…

We just uploaded our most recently minted projected to Research Gate. The story started as a collaboration between my lab, that of Armin Bahl’s in Konstanz, Hanna Zwaka’s new lab in Magdeburg, and Mark Fishman’s here at Harvard.