Connectionists: Workshop of Ideas in Neuroscience: Rethinking Naturalistic Behavior, Dolomites, Feb 2024

[Mateusz Kostecki]

Dear colleagues!

We are super happy to announce the first event of our new initiative:
*Workshops
of Ideas in Neuroscience*! Our workshops, inspired by our School of Ideas
in Neuroscience, will be informal, intensive events based on long talks,
small groups, a relaxed atmosphere, organized in beautiful surroundings, and
with a lot of time to think!

For the first workshop, we will meet in Dolomites mountains, Italy, to
discuss *naturalistic behavioral paradigms in neuroscience*.

Many systems neuroscientists are now designing their behavioral paradigms
to match the *natural* environments of the animals they study: they broaden
the space animals can use, make it more complex, or even go to the field.
"Naturalistic" or "ethologically relevant" behaviors became buzzwords, and
there is no worse offense than calling your paradigm "unnatural".

As good and refreshing revolutions in science are, there is always a time
when it is good to stop and think. We think *it is time to rethink
naturalistic behaviors in neuroscience. *

What is really *natural*? What do we know about the ecological niches of
our mice, rats, or fishes? Does every study need to be ethologically
relevant? What really do we lose when we head-fix our mouse? Can we really
categorize brain activity as natural or unnatural?

We will discuss those topics in our workshop that will be held *February
22-25th 2024* in Dolomites! You will find *more information and the
application form on our webpage - https://nenckiopenlab.org/dolomites/
<https://nenckiopenlab.org/dolomites>.* *The deadline for application is
November 20th, 2023. *
With best wishes,
Luigi, Matilde, Natascha, Ania and Mateusz
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20230925/c1433357/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: plakat_summerlab_2022_internet.png
Type: image/png
Size: 3731518 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20230925/c1433357/attachment-0001.png>