Cognition and Behaviour

Professor Bruno van Swinderen began studying general anaesthesia using the tiny worm C.elegans in the 1990s. Now in his lab at UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, Bruno and Dr Drew Cylinder are studying general anaesthesia reversal agents, which could shorten patients’ recovery time.

QBI's Associate Professor Tara Walker and Professor Jana Vukovic investigate how exercise enhances cognitive capacity from different angles, and the health benefits exercise has on our brains.

Virtual reality (VR) is changing how scientists study memory, and it involves exploring virtual mazes. QBI's Professor Jason Mattingley, PhD student Richard Ronayne, and research assistant Jayce Rushton take us behind the scenes of their VR experiments.

QBI's Professor Massimo Hilliard and Dr Ramon Martinez-Marmol have been extending the limits of what is known about neuronal fusion and its exciting potential to one day revolutionise nerve injury repair.

QBI's Dr Margreet Ridder and Professor Pankaj Sah share their insight on the intricate science of gene therapy and how it can be used to fight motor neurone disease.

Dr Matt Kenna explores how memories are formed, retrieved, and influence behaviour, while reflecting on the importance of memories in shaping who we are.

Why do we buy one car and not the other? What should I pay my staff? How much am I prepared to spend on a house? As a Research Fellow in Neuroeconomics, Dr Rangelov investigates human sensory perception, decision-making and memory.

QBI researchers are using technology to deliver electrical impulse to the brain to treat disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and obsessive compulsion disorder (OCD).

Dr Anthony Harris is an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute and an expert on human attention. He discusses what goes on in the brain when we are giving something our full attention, and breaks down whether or not multitasking is a myth.

New research born out of collaborations with virologists and neuroscience here at QBI has shown that coronavirus has co-opted a clever entry mechanism to get into cells - including neurons.