The brain’s ability to recognize and tune out sensory stimuli produced by the body’s own actions – to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’ – is a long recognized, yet poorly understood, biological phenomenon. Nathanial Sawtell, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, focuses his research on uncovering how it works.

Dr. Sawtell, who is also professor of neuroscience at Columbia University Medical Center, and his team have largely tackled this issue using an unusual model system — a species of electric fish, called the elephantnose fish, from Africa that both generates and senses electricity. Their studies have revealed important insights into how circuits in the brains of these fish distinguish behaviorally relevant inputs – such as signals generated by prey – from electrical “noise” that the fish generates itself.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, he and his team have gone from the sea to land, examining whether the fish’s noise cancelling mechanisms are also present in mice.

This paper is titled, “A cerebellum–like circuit in the auditory system cancels responses to self–generated sounds.”