Anthony Zador

Assistant Professor
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

M.D., Ph.D., Yale University

Phone: (516) 367-6950
zador_at_cshl.org

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

The Zador Website at CSHL

Research

At a cocktail party we can selectively attend to a single voice, effortlessly filtering out all the others that make up the banter that surrounds us; yet this task remains far beyond the capabilities of our most sophisticated computers. How do the neurons in our brains conspire to form such powerful computational engines? The working hypothesis of our laboratory is that there is something special about cortical "wetware"- the neurons and synapses that act as both the hardware and software of biological computation-that makes it different from a digital computer, and that the special characteristics of this wetware enforce a style of computation that makes brains particularly good at solving hard problems such as the cocktail party problem.

The focus of research in our laboratory is understanding auditory processing in the rodent cortex. Although more is known about visual processing in the mammalian brain, the auditory system offers several advantages. Auditory stimuli are sufficiently complex to pose interesting computational problems; but they are not too complex: the auditory stimulus that reaches each ear is fully characterized by a single time-varying waveform. In addition, auditory stimuli can easily be presented to an alert animal without its special cooperation. We use a variety of theoretical and experimental approaches, including extracellular and intracellular (whole cell patch) techniques in anesthetized and awake animals. Current projects in the laboratory include: (1) characterizing the synaptic currents that drive cortical neurons to respond; (2) developing an experimental model of selective auditory attention in rodents; and (3) developing formal models of computation that incorporate biological features, such as dynam synapses, that increase computational power.