What’s going on in our brains when we are fooled by an optical illusion? How do our neurons take shortcuts to avoid sensory overload while taking in the world around us? What happens when our predictions of the world don’t match reality?
New research projects are underway at the Allen Institute to address these questions through OpenScope, the shared neuroscience observatory that allows scientists around the world to propose and direct experiments conducted on one of the Institute’s high-throughput experimental platforms.
OpenScope was launched in 2018, opening the Allen Brain Observatory to researchers outside the Institute. The Allen Brain Observatory is a standardized experimental platform that allows scientists to study the mouse brain in action. Currently, scientists are studying visual regions of the mouse brain as animals see and respond to different pictures or movies; the Observatory team has plans to expand to other areas of the brain in coming years.
Last year, OpenScope received a 5-year grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to support its work, in which Allen Institute experts conduct experiments proposed by researchers from outside the Institute and release the resulting data back to those researchers to analyze. The data from OpenScope projects, like all data from the Allen Brain Observatory, is also made publicly available for anyone in the scientific community to use.
