The '
International Brain Laboratory
'' (IBL) is a collaborative research group that aims to develop the first global model of decision making in mice. In its first phase, IBL members are recording 100,000's of neurons across virtually all brain structures in mice performing the very same decision. IBL was officially launched in September 2017 thanks to a $10 million grant from

Simons Foundation The Simons Foundation is a private foundation established in 1994 by Marilyn and Jim Simons with offices in New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States ...

and a £10 million grant from the

Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glax ...

. The first major scientific milestones for the project are the development of an open source data architecture for large scale neuroscience collaboration and the replication of the behavior across all experimental labs. In late 2019, the IBL released the behavioral data, containing close to 3 million mouse choices. The subsequent milestone involves the assembly of a brain-wide map of activity. This map of activity is being obtained with Neuropixels probes, which allow recording up to 300-1000 neurons simultaneously. Other recording technologies, such as calcium imaging, will be used in the second phase. These data will then be analyzed and integrated to produce the brain-wide model of decision making.

Origin

IBL was founded in 2016 by

Zachary Mainen Zachary F. Mainen (born 20 February 1969, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America) is an American neuroscientist whose research focuses on the brain mechanisms of decision-making. Zachary Mainen moved to Lisbon, Portugal in 2007 and has been ...

(Champalimaud Center for the Unknown),

Michael Hausser Michael A. Häusser Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS FMedSci is professor of Neuroscience, based in the UCL Wolfson Institute, Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London, University College London (UCL). Education Haus ...

(

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

), and

Alexandre Pouget Alexandre Pouget is a full Professor at the University of Geneva in the department of basic neurosciences. Background and education He received his undergraduate education at the École normale supérieure (Paris), before moving to the Salk Inst ...

(

University of Geneva The University of Geneva (French: ''Université de Genève'') is a public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1559 by John Calvin as a theological seminary. It remained focused on theology until the 17th centur ...

). These scientists argued in a paper published the same year that, given the complexity of the questions in neuroscience and the scale of the technical challenge, it seems unlikely that the research performed by individual labs will be sufficient to understand how the brain works. Inspired by the remarkable success of large scale collaborations in physics such as CERN or LIGO, they proposed creating similar focused collaborations in neuroscience based on several core principles: # A shared ambitious, yet realistic, goal (e.g. a brain-wide model of decision making in a single species), # Tight coordination between theorists and experimentalists. # Standardization of the behavioral tasks, hardware and data analysis to ensure

reproducibility Reproducibility, also known as replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a ...

and allowing pooling of data, # Open access to data and resources within and outside the collaboration, and # A relatively flat hierarchy and a collaborative decision-making process. These principles are at the heart of the IBL collaboration.

Membership

Mainen, Hausser and Pouget were joined in 2016 by * Larry Abbott (Columbia University) *

Dora Angelaki Dora Angelaki is a Professor of Neuroscience in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. She previously held the Wilhelmina Robertson Professorship of Neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine. She looks at multi-sensory info ...

(New York University) * Matteo Carandini (

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

) * Anne Churchland (University of California Los Angeles) * Yang Dan (University of California Berkeley) *

Peter Dayan Peter Dayan is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He is co-author of ''Theoretical Neuroscience'', an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian m ...

( Max Planck Institute Tuebingen) * Sophie Deneve ( Ecole Normale Superieure) * Ila Fiete (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) * Surya Ganguli (Stanford University) * Kenneth Harris (

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

) * Peter Latham (

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

) *

Sonja Hofer Sonja Hofer is a German neuroscientist studying the neural basis of sensory perception and sensory-guided decision-making at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. Her research focuses on how the brain processes visual in ...

(

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

) * Tom Mrsic-Flogel (

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

) *

Liam Paninski Liam Paninski (born 1978) is an American computational neuroscientist who specializes in neural data science. He is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Neuroscience at Columbia University, where he co-directs the Grossman Center for t ...

(Columbia University) * Jonathan Pillow (Princeton University) * Ilana Witten (Princeton University) *

Tony Zador Anthony M. Zador is an American neuroscientist and the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology and Chair of Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a co-founder, in 2004, of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) confer ...

(

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, and quantitative biology. It is one of 68 institutions supported by the Cancer Centers ...

) David Tank and

Carlos Brody Carlos D. Brody is a Mexican neuroscientist who is currently the Wilbur H. Gantz III '59 Professor in Neuroscience at Princeton University and is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. A cited expert in his field, his interests in ...

(both at Princeton University) joined in 2016 but withdrew in 2017 due to conflicts of interest. Nick Steinmetz (

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

) joined in 2019, and Tatiana Engel (

) in 2020.

References

{{Reflist 2017 establishments 2017 in science Neuroscience projects