The University of Chicago NEURO Club's Committee on Undergraduate Enrichment (CUE) led by Christian Adames ('15) invited their first speaker for the 2013-2014 Neuroscience Lecture Series on November 5th, 2013 at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
Dr. Peggy Mason received her Bachelor's degree from Harvard University and her PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mason is currently a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago and is the author of "Medical Neurobiology" (Oxford University Press, 2011).
In her lecture "The Neurobiology of Helping: Lessons from Rats", Dr. Mason explores the rodent model for empathic helping. In her laboratory, a rat learns, without external reward or training, to deliberately open a door and thereby free a trapped rat. The motivational impetus for this pro-social behavior is neither motor mastery nor the potential reward of social play. Instead, Dr. Mason's work suggests that communication of distress from the trapped rat to the free rat is required for helping. A rat that successfully releases a trapped rat experiences ending the trapped rat's distress as internally rewarding, meaning that helping has desirable consequences that the rat craves to experience again.
After decades of focusing on descending pain modulation, recently, Peggy Mason's laboratory has worked primarily on the neurobiology of empathy and pro-social behavior. They are using a number of behavioral, anatomical, and imaging-based approaches to explore the biological basis of empathically motivated helping behavior. They want to understand the basic biological mechanisms that support helping as well as the developmental and environmental factors that influence the expression of pro-social behavior.
Check out the Mason Laboratory:
http://masonlab.uchicago.edu/
More about our speaker:
http://neuroscience.uchicago.edu/?p=neuro%2Fprofile&id=24
This video is brought to you by NEURO at the University of Chicago.
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