Weiss Laboratory, Fishberg Department of Neuroscience, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Mount Sinai School of Medicine

A striking feature of behaviors is that they are influenced by recent experiences. Recent experiences alter internal states of organisms and thereby influence the selection and articulation of behavior. Our research aims to understand the mnemonic component of internal states, specifically how the memory of recent experiences is induced, maintained, and expressed in the nervous system. Given that over 80 percent of our behaviors consist of complex multiphasic responses (rather than simple reflexes) our work focuses on complex feeding responses. Importantly, in view of the complexity of the questions that we address, we have chosen to ask them in a preparation that has a relatively simple nervous system in which basic biological questions can be probed directly. Our model system is the marine mollusc Aplysia californica.