SENZAI LAB

at Northwestern University

Our lab studies how we act, perceive, and form memory in waking life and in dreams

While dreaming we believe that we are executing some movement, and then we dream further that the natural results of this movement occur. We dream that we climb into a boat, shove it off from shore, guide it over the water, watch the surrounding objects shift position, and so on.

—  Hermann von Helmholtz
The Facts of Perception, 1878

We perceive the world by actively sampling it, e.g. by eye movements and head turns. Our memory of past experiences is thus often coupled with our actions in the environment. How does our brain internally integrate our actions into perception and memory of the perceived world? 

Our lab will address this question by focusing on dream perception during sleep. Our conscious experience while dreaming can be just as vivid as during waking life. How does our brain internally generate dreams where we can act and perceive so vividly? Answering this question will provide clues to the nature of our internal generative model of the world, which is also crucial for our awake perception. 

To this end, our lab focuses on the superior colliculus as a central hub orchestrating perception and learning during wakefulness and sleep. The superior colliculus is not only critical for sensory-motor integration per se, but also interacts tightly with thalamocortical networks important for vision, action, navigation, and memory formation. Our lab combines cutting-edge technologies in freely behaving and sleeping mice, such as chronic large-scale electrophysiological recordings, decoding neuronal representation, opto- and chemogenetics, eye movement monitoring, behavioral analysis, and computational techniques.