Neural circuits have been honed by evolution to enable animals to instinctively survive and reproduce in the world that surrounds them. Mammals, however, also have a distinct ability to weigh primal instinct against experience, allowing us to learn how to appropriately respond based on our unique knowledge of the dynamic world around us. However, how the mammalian brain balances the innate robustness of neural circuits with the flexibility afforded by learning remains unclear.

Dr. Tom Hindmarsh Sten aims to answer these questions as a JCC-HHMI Fellow in Dr. Liqun Luo’s lab at Stanford University. To investigate how instinctive behaviors can be modified by learning, Dr. Hindmarsh Sten will leverage natural variation in the ability of mice to suppress their innate fears and learn how to hunt live prey. He will delineate an anatomical blueprint of neural circuits that mediate evasion and predation, and pinpoint the plastic nodes impacted by learning. These studies will reveal how neural circuits, which have been refined by eons of evolution, are modulated to meet immediate and novel demands in the present.

As a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Vanessa Ruta’s lab at Rockefeller University, Hindmarsh Sten investigated neural circuits mediating reproduction in fruit flies. He pioneered a novel virtual reality-based behavioral preparation which revealed that sexual arousal in male flies reconfigures how they see and respond to female flies. Additionally, Hindmarsh Sten examined how male flies coordinate aggression amongst rivals with courtship towards females in competitive environments where more than one male fly is vying for each female’s attention. This study revealed neural populations that allow males to rapidly switch between aggression and courtship. With this background, Hindmarsh Sten is primed to investigate how learning modulates innate instinct in mammals.