van Swinderen research

Selective attention 

Selective attention refers to the brain’s capacity to prioritise one set of stimuli while ignoring others. This serial way of perceiving the world promotes learning and memory. Amazingly, even flies seem to pay attention to their world in a similar way, suggesting a common mechanism in all animal brains. We discovered that this common mechanism may be centred oscillatory neural activity in the brain. Dynamic oscillations in different frequency ranges (e.g., 20-30Hz ‘beta’ or 30-50Hz ‘gamma’) are evident when we record brain activity from flies attending to visual objects. Optogenetic approaches allow us to control specific circuits in the fly brain to understand how these oscillations work to help the brain pay attention. To study this, we have developed virtual reality visual environments for both tethered and freely-walking flies. We are especially interested in understanding how attention might be affected by sleep process.

Sleep

Although everyone spends about a third of their life sleeping, the function of sleep remains mysterious. Sleep deprivation is an increasing concern in modern societies, and deleterious effects of sleep deprivation on attention and performance can be as tragic as the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption. We have developed sleep models in Drosophila melanogaster and are investigating how sleep and attention are mechanistically related in the fly brain. We are as interested in understanding how sleep works to block out the world as what it’s for. We have recently discovered that, like many other animals, flies sleep in different stages. This includes a deep sleep stage that seems to be important for maintaining cellular health, as well as an ‘active’ sleep stage that helps flies pay better attention. Our findings suggest conservation of key sleep functions through evolution.

General anaesthesia

The mechanism of general anaesthesia remains unknown, despite almost 200 years since we began using these drugs for surgery. One reason the mechanism has remained so difficult to tackle lies in its complexity. We have discovered a new presynaptic mechanism for general anaesthesia centred on the neurotransmitter release machinery. Together with better understood post-synaptic receptor targets for these drugs, our finding potentially explains how these diverse mechanisms come together to produce the loss of consciousness that is required for surgery. We use a broad range of neuroscience techniques, from single molecule imaging and neuron recordings to whole brain imaging and behavioural analysis, to understand how general anaesthesia really works to render a brain completely unresponsive.