Understanding how the human brain learns
- 04 February 2025
- 2 minutes
Ata Elbizanti (Physiology, Development and Neuroscience PhD 2024) is a Gates Cambridge scholar interested in understanding how learning affects brain activity, particularly in areas responsible for processing visual information and those involved in decision-making. Her aim is to improve treatments for cognitive deficits and enhance our overall understanding of the brain and how we perceive the world.
Ata is the first Gates Cambridge Scholar from Libya. She was born in Tripoli, the youngest of three children. From middle school where the world of science opened up to her, feeding her natural curiosity, she had a plan to study abroad and get access to a high quality education to pursue her interest in the brain. After the 2011 revolution and subsequent 2014 civil war in Libya, this no longer seemed possible, but she didn’t give up. She says: “In Libya you learn from a very young age that your path is defined by your own choices. Sometimes you have to take things into your own hands and find different ways of not letting go of something that you want to achieve.”
Ata’s PhD in Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at Dr Jasper Poort’s Selective Vision Lab will see her studying the brain on a circuit level and seeking to explore how neurons interact in a neural network and what the connections made mean. “It’s like posting a letter that goes to a person via different routes. I want to understand how those different routes work and to isolate the routes that may be causing problems,” says Ata.
She will be using advanced techniques such as two-photon Calcium imaging and Optogenetics to image individual neurons in genetic mouse models of neurodevelopmental disorders and healthy mice while they perform visually-guided decision tasks. The objective of the experiments is to understand how the mice’s brains process sensory information and how neural circuit dynamics change with learning and attention. The ultimate aim is to eventually develop treatments for humans that can precisely target circuits where there are problems, as most current treatments are more general and act on the whole brain.
“We hope to uncover the mystery of how visual learning and attention shape the neural processes that determine how we interact with the world,” says Ata. “This work could be revolutionary. The more we understand how the brain learns and pays attention, the more we can develop targeted treatments for people struggling with neurodevelopmental disorders and cognitive deficits. This deeper understanding could help reduce stigma, improve how we approach these conditions, and ultimately enhance our interactions with one another.”