University of Oxford - Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour

The Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB) is an autonomous research centre embedded in the stimulating world of the University of Oxford. It is supported by a Strategic Award from the Wellcome Trust and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and accommodates part of the programme on Mind and Machine of the Oxford Martin School.

The aim of the CNCB is to understand how intelligence emerges from the physical interaction of nerve cells.

‘The cell is the fundamental unit of life. The neural cell is the fundamental unit of intelligence, memory and consciousness, but we won’t understand any of these evolved abilities until we work out how neurons act together, and how circuits of neurons are integrated together.’ Eric Kandel

We address this problem by studying the brain from the top down rather than from the bottom up: we reason from behaviour to cellular and molecular mechanisms. Much of our research is done in fruit flies, where physical events in nerve cells can be linked to higher brain function more easily than in other animals, in which either the behaviour is too simple or the brain structures are too complex.