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.

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.

Did you know? Humans are pretty average when it comes to seeing the visual world compared to many other animals with much smaller brains. Or that octopuses are essentially colourblind? And that there’s really no such thing as colour?

How do birds and bees fly in groups without colliding? or know how to navigate straight to a food source?

Evolution has guided us to spend hours every night in our most vulnerable state – unconscious and unaware. It’s an easy question to ask: what’s the point?

Rebecca Sharrock has a condition called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, which enables her to remember every day of her life in clear, intricate detail