Yang Dan

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  www.genesis-sim.org/uses - [Cached Version]
  Last Visited: 3/25/2008  

  Yang Dan
  
  Yang Dan's lab here at UCB is interested in computational, physiologicaland developmental neurobiology of the mammalian visual system.

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  www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=news_101909f - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/19/2009    Last Visited: 11/2/2009  

  DAN, HOLY, AND YASUDA RECEIVE $25,000 RESEARCH AWARDS FOR INNOVATION IN NEUROSCIENCE
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  CHICAGO - The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) awarded the Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience (RAIN) to Yang Dan, PhD, Tim Holy, PhD, and Ryohei Yasuda, PhD, during Neuroscience 2009, SfN's annual meeting and the world's largest source of emerging news on brain science and health.
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  Dan, who is currently a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, is applying an innovative approach in her studies of cortical plasticity and visual coding that is helping to bridge the gap between cellular and systems neuroscience. Dan and her team use techniques that range from electrophysiological studies in cultured tissue to psychophysical experiments in humans. Her research has helped to better model electrical signals in the human brain and how they are affected by natural stimuli.

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  www.theswartzfoundation.com/summer_meeting_2001.asp?pri - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/1/2001    Last Visited: 9/30/2009  

  Yang Dan, Invited speaker, UC-Berkeley

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  www.osavisionmeeting.org/2007_new/program.php - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/1/2007    Last Visited: 2/6/2008  

  Moderator: Yang Dan, UC Berkeley

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  www.hhmi.org/news/dan20090430.html - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/7/2009    Last Visited: 5/12/2009  

  The pulsing of a single neuron can switch a brain's waves from the equivalent of a big ocean swell to ripples on a pond, according to new research from Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Yang Dan of the University of California, Berkeley.
  
  The study reveals important new information about how the brain controls large-scale activity patterns and suggests that an individual cell has more influence than previously thought. The findings, published in the May 1, 2009, issue of the journal Science, could ultimately shed light on how chaotic brain patterns can lead to sleep disorders such as sleepwalking.
  
  "Single neurons have more weight than we used to think." Yang Dan
  
  Brain cells use electrical pulses to talk with one another and guide functions ranging from heart rate and breathing to decision-making and navigation. Like the din of a crowd, the chatter of 100 billion neuronal cells in the human brain creates larger patterns of activity commonly called brain waves.
  
  These patterns reveal the brain's general state of arousal. For instance, large, slow brain waves that are synchronized throughout the brain are indicative of deep sleep. "Many neurons are doing the same thing at the same time," says Dan. During so-called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, on the other hand, different brain areas are less synchronized, firing in smaller and more frequent oscillations. And in an awake person, the brain broadcasts a rapid, uncoordinated pattern.
  
  Dan and her colleagues wanted to understand how large-scale wave patterns influence the connection between two neurons.
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  "Initially, this was very inconvenient," says Dan. But then the researchers realized that the phenomenon deserved more attention. Looking more closely, they verified that a neuron firing at high frequency could switch the brain from a "non-REM pattern" of activity to a "REM pattern," and vice versa.
  
  The result was counterintuitive. "Every neuron makes connections to roughly 1,000 other neurons, but most of those are quite weak," says Dan. A target cell won't respond unless many, many neurons that connect to it fire at the same time and therefore she says it's surprising that a single neuron could change the activity of the whole brain. "Single neurons have more weight than we used to think," she says.
  
  Dan doesn't yet know how one cell could exert such power. The researchers had to repeatedly and rapidly fire a cell to cause the pattern to switch, so they might be emulating the effect of many cells firing at once. A neuron doesn't normally fire in that way, so it is an open question whether the activity of a single neuron could change overall brain pattern under normal circumstances.
  
  The findings add a new twist to how brain patterns are established. Researchers know that certain brain structures, such as the hypothalamus and the brain stem, play a part in setting the pace of global brain activity. In this study, Dan and her team were tickling brain cells in a different area: the cortex, the thin sheet of neurons on the surface of the brain involved in such abilities as moving and seeing.
  
  Dan isn't certain how cells in the cortex might control brain state, but she posits that signaling there could link back to the thalamus and spur it to set up a new pattern. "We know that a lot of circuits are involved in controlling brain state," says Dan. "We're saying that cortex is also part of that loop."
  
  By providing new information about how brain states are controlled, the study might ultimately lead to new knowledge about what causes certain sleep disorders. "In sleepwalking, there is a mixed-up boundary between slow-wave sleep and the awake state," says Dan.
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  Yang Dan
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  Yang Dan

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  www.dailycal.org/article/105589/study_finds_activity_of - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/6/2009    Last Visited: 5/8/2009  

  Yang Dan, a UC Berkeley professor of neurobiology who worked on the study, said researchers did not expect to find that the brain changed in response to charging a single cell.
  
  "The real surprise is a single neuron activity can change the brain activity globally," she said.

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  www.outlookseries.com/news/Science/3496.htm - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/6/2008    Last Visited: 11/15/2008  

  The project "Deep learning in the mammalian visual cortex" (grant #0835878) will be led by Andrew Ng of Stanford, in collaboration with Ed Boyden of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yann LeCun of New York University, and Yang Dan of the University of California, Berkeley.

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  www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/dan_bio.html - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/27/2008    Last Visited: 5/12/2009  

  Yang Dan, Ph.D.
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  Yang Dan
  
  As a child, Yang Dan had a head start in math. Before she ever entered a classroom in her hometown of Beijing, her father, a nuclear physicist, taught her elementary math. She entered math competitions in elementary school, and in high school she won first prize two years in a row in the Beijing High School Mathematics Competition. "You know, once you have a little advantage, you just have fun with it," she says with a bit of a shrug and a laugh.
  
  Following undergraduate studies in physics at Beijing University, Dan applied to Columbia University for graduate work in biology, where she received an HHMI predoctoral fellowship. She'd never taken a biology course, but she thought it might satisfy her desire to study profound questions. Her classmates in New York often asked how she was coping with the transition from China to the United States. "New York is such a big city, like Beijing, I didn't feel a culture shock," she says. "It was all of the biology courses that were more overwhelming!"
  
  Now studying the neurobiology of vision at the University of California, Berkeley, Dan finds that her previous training in physics and mathematics enables her to take on more complex biology questions than she might otherwise. Instead of looking at what happens at the level of a single neuron, or with a simple pattern of stimulation, Dan tackles the big-picture, systems-level questions: What happens in a circuit of connected neurons or when a neuron receives complex stimuli, as in real life? "I think in systems neuroscience, data analysis is always a huge deal," Dan says.
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  "It's a very powerful illusion," Dan says.
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  Testing the responses of these neurons to simple stimuli is unlikely to solve the puzzle, says Dan. Instead, she and her team are testing neuronal responses in V2 and V4 to complex stimuli, such as natural scenes, and then using their computational skills to sort out what exactly the neurons in each region respond to. They don't have answers yet, but Dan has set up several approaches to work on the problem, including a collaboration with researchers in Shanghai.
  
  Dan takes her responsibility as teacher and role model-especially to women scientists-seriously. These duties give her the opportunity to support the next generation. She's even mentoring some of the students in the lab of her Shanghai colleagues. "China is a huge country, with a lot of very talented students, who are working very hard," she says. "The students are hungry for guidance. I talk to them, look at their data, and give them some suggestions. It is really rewarding. Perhaps Dan's help will prove to be their extra advantage-just like the one Dan's father gave her as a child.
  
  Dr. Dan is also Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley.
  
  RESEARCH ABSTRACT SUMMARY:
  
  Yang Dan's laboratory studies how visual information is encoded in the activity of cortical neurons and how cortical circuits are shaped by experience. Using both bottom-up and top-down approaches and a combination of electrophysiology, imaging, and computational techniques, her group aims to understand neural processing at multiple levels, from synaptic learning rules to cortical microcircuitry, and from network dynamics to animal behavior.

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  la.indymedia.org/news/2008/03/214879.php - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/1/2008    Last Visited: 5/23/2009  

  Yang Dan: Electrodes inserted into cats brains.
  
  Home: Yang Dan 140 Panoramic Way Berkeley, CA 94704
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  Professor Yang Dan
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  UC Berkeley's Yang Dan has been using and abusing cats and rodents for years in useless "scientific curiousity" visual experiments, like her natural scenes experiment, where she recorded the world through a cat's eyes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/471786.stm Supposedly performed under sufficient anesthesia, Yang Dan's cats and other animals are paralyzed with a drug, a hole is drilled in their skulls and electrodes inserted directly into their brains. They are placed in "stereotaxic device with ear bars, eye bars and a mouth bar to stabilize the head position. Their eyes are "glued" to "posts. They are subjected to visual stimuli, and the electrical firings of roughly a dozen single brain cells or less are recorded continuously for up to "72 hours" non-stop until the "cortex stops giving normal visual responses. Rats are placed in a "light-tight box, and kept under no-light conditions for 48 hours to 1 week prior to recording," or one eye would be sewed shut. Rats will also undergo fluid deprivation to "motivate" them to perform tasks to test Dr. Dan's "visual discrimination paradigm. The purpose, she claims, is to "understand how visual neurons code and process information" and how "connectivity between them are modulated by visual inputs. From a 2003 paper of Yang Dan's: A total of 18 anesthetized adult cats were used. ...Single unit recordings were made in area 17 [of the brain] using tungsten electrodes.

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  www.theswartzfoundation.org/multi-level.asp - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 9/1/2006    Last Visited: 9/30/2009  

  9:45 - Yang Dan, UC Berkeley
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  Yang Dan, UC Berkeley

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