Technique / Neuroscience

Neuroscience is a field that is devoted to the scientific study of the nervous system. Such studies span the structure, function, evolutionary history, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, informatics, computational neuroscience and pathology of the nervous system.

Non-human primates have a small but important role in basic and translational biomedical research, owing to similarities with human beings in physiology, cognitive capabilities, neuroanatomy, social complexity, reproduction, and development. Although non-human primates have contributed to many areas of biomedical research, we review here their unique contributions to work in neuroscience, and focus on four domains: Alzheimer's disease, neuroAIDS, Parkinson's disease, and stress. Our discussion includes, for example, the role of non-human primates in development of new treatments (eg, stem cells, gene transfer) before phase I clinical trials in patients; basic research on disease pathogenesis; and understanding neurobehavioural outcomes resulting from genotype-environment interactions.

All choices are economic decisions, and this is true because mobile organisms run on batteries. For them the clock is always ticking and their battery draining so every moment represents a choice of how to invest a bit of energy. From this perspective, all choices - those made and those not made - engender costs and yield variable future returns. There is no more fundamental stricture for an organism than to behave so as to recharge their batteries; consequently, each moment of existence is attended by the need to value that moment and its near-term future quickly and accurately. The central issue of neuroeconomics is valuation - the way the brain values literally everything from internal mental states to experienced time (the neuroscience part), and why it should do so one way and not another (the normative economics part). All these valuations have now begun to be probed in experiments by pairing quantitative behavioral and computational modeling with neuroimaging or neurophysiological experiments.