RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

The understanding of cerebral functions

“Right now, your brain and nervous system are busy making sense of this sentence — just one example of how basic the brain is to every function of your waking and sleeping life. If you are sighted, the nerve cells in your eyes are sensing the outline of the letters and transmitting the message from your eyes to your brain. (For Braille readers, nerves in the fingers send similar information from the skin up through the spinal cord to the brain.) About one fourth of the brain is involved in this visual processing, more than any other sense. The precise process of reading, like many other brain functions, is a topic of intense research by neuroscientists”.[The essential principles of neuroscience]

All the research carried out at IoNS aims to understand the specific brain functions, and consequently the degeneration of certain essential functions. Therefore, the development of Neuroscience is a major challenge for our current society.

3 main approaches

The setting-up of our institute encourages collaboration between the different teams involved in research in Neuroscience.

These teams have been grouped together by 3 approaches, according to their research topics.

synergies

The aim of this grouping together is to increase synergies within and between these areas of research.

We can illustrate this with three examples:

To allow an effective and professional use of functional imaging

To encourage an integrated analysis of animal models, from the conception of the models to the study of various aspects of phenotypes, “from the molecule to the behaviour”

to work closely on ocular movements

mouvements oculaires

| 5/01/2010 |