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Overview
Mark Stopfer's group, the Section on Sensory Coding and Neural Ensembles, is interested in understanding how brain mechanisms gather and organize sensory information to build transient and sometimes enduring internal representations of an animal's surroundings; the animal actively collects information, which is then processed and dramatically transformed in myriad ways. The Unit's goal is to understand the fundamental mechanisms by which sensory information is collected, transformed, stabilized, and compared as it makes its way through the nervous system. Using relatively simple animals and focusing primarily on olfaction, the Unit combines electrophysiological, anatomical, genetic, behavioral, computational, and other strategies to examine how fully intact neural circuits, driven by real sensory stimuli, process information.