The SWC are pleased to announced the Student Symposium 2026.

Abstract:

Neuroscience has vastly expanded our knowledge of the brain, revealing biological detail at every scale, from ion channels and synaptic transmission to the dynamics of large neural populations. A central goal of modern neuroscience is to link these biological mechanisms to behaviour and, ultimately, to psychological function, often with the implicit assumption that doing so amounts to understanding the mind. But what can neuroscience actually teach us about the mind? Many behaviours can already be described and predicted without any reference to biological function. By identifying the neural correlates of a behaviour, do we genuinely deepen our understanding of it? What does a biological mechanism add to psychological explanation and where does it fall short of providing one at all? These questions have only grown more pressing in the age of AI: should we understand a system by what it does, its behaviour and output, or by how it works on the inside, through its internal mechanisms?

Click here for the programme.

Speakers:

Professor Lisa Bortolotti, University of Birmingham

Professor Zoe Kourtzi, Cambridge University

Professor John Krakauer, Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon & Johns Hopkins University

Professor Christopher Summerfield, Oxford University

Professor Daniel Yamins, Stanford University

The event is free and open to all.

Don't miss out on this informative and engaging event. Register now to secure your spot!

SWC/GCNU Student Symposium Team

The Student Symposium is organised jointly by PhD students of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit of University College London. This is the sixth instalment of an annual discussion-based event that aims to bring together neuroscience researchers from the UK and abroad to engage with current and future problems in neuroscience.

Description supplied by the event organiser.