陳綺如博士演講 9/6/2010

Topic: Vestibuloocular reflex: a model system for understanding the three dimentional sensorimotor transformation in brain

It is so cool to hear different information, even it is very hard to understand it. She used to study in Departement of Occupational therapy in NTU. She is Dr. Pan's classmate. Although she gets involved in more basic scientic research, I admire her devotion. She said she used to spend more than 8 hours doing the research or leave the lab by 11pm, when she was a doctoral student. She said doing research needed passion. I hope I could keep the motivation and increase the passion to do the research in my whole life.

Although I did not really understand what she shared today, I think I still want to say something in the diary.
She studiesverstibuloocular reflex (VOR,  前庭動眼反射). She explained a lot about vesibular system (input), and a little bit about visual muscle (motor part, output) and the central system. She spoke out something attractive to me.

1. She said vestibular system includes two domains, such as temporal (dynamics velocity and acceleration) and spatial (directions). I have heard abot verstibulocochlear system. I have known a little about the temporal and spatial domains for hearing sound. When we hear the sound, there is time difference for hearing the sound between two ears, so we could sense the temporal domain. Because the sound is from different location, there is the sptial domain for hearing sound.
She emphased a lot "spatio-temporal convergence (STC)".
There are so many important anatomic relationship between vestibular and cochlear system. Today, I could know more about the relevant functions between vestibular system and cochlear system.

2. She mentioned a little about "neural integrator" and "nucleus prepositus hypoglossi". Although I did not really get it, find it later if I am still interested in.

3. Vestibulocerebellum plays a role in tweaking motor outputs based on visual demands. She said it is important to understand vestibulocerebellum or flocculus/ventraparaflocculus (FL/VPF) in her field.

Well, most of time, I got lost from her speech. She said there are important relationships between vestibular and vision, and also vestibular and cochlear. She devoted into vestibular and vision. I am more interested in vestibular and cochlear. Doing research is a fantastic task, especially when we get the achievement. Hopefully, I could have a team and have funding support to have fun together.