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Please join us for ION Science Hour this afternoon at 5 pm in the LISB Atrium. Talk science, whip up a new collaboration, enjoy salty snacks, gluten free options, and as always plenty of high-quality beverages.
Jessie Uehling is a mycologist and an Assistant Professor of Fungal Biology in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University. She runs a mycological research lab focused on genetic diversity and evolution of fungi via their symbioses with other organisms. She currently is also a co-chair and the Mycologist for the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board. In this talk she will describe the morphological and genetic diversity of psilocybin producing fungi. She will also detail the current usage by species and country, and ethnobotanical history for psilocybin producing fungi uses. Last she will describe the structure and functioning of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board, and mycological logic underpinning recommendations for what are now the ORS 475A Psilocybin Regulations.
We are interested in how the nervous system learns from experience in dynamic environments. We trained mice on a dynamic foraging task, in which they freely chose between two alternatives that delivered reward with changing probabilities. We found that serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe represented a quantity related to reward uncertainty over long timescales (tens of seconds), consistent with a modulatory signal used to adjust learning rates of ongoing decision variables in frontal cortex. In locus coeruleus, we found two types of norepinephrine neuron, including one that provided a reward prediction error for cortex. Our results provide quantitative links between activity of two key neuromodulators--serotonin and norepinephrine--and dynamic behavior.