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Michale Fee studies the neural mechanisms of sequence generation and learning. He is faculty in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He received a B.E. with honors in Engineering Physics from the School of [...]

The McKnight technology award supports scientists using novel and creative approaches to understanding brain function. McGovern Institute investigator Michale Fee has been selected to receive a 2018 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award for his research on “new technologies for imaging and analyzing neural [...]

A new algorithm, called seqNMF, can detect sequences in neural data generated by ‘internal behaviors,’ such as an animal thinking or sleeping. Listening to Mozart’s iconic “Turkish March,” it’s easy to pick out the motifs that recur throughout the piece. But identifying that string of notes would be much more [...]

In 2002, Morven and Michael Heller from London, a generous and philanthropic family, decided to donate an annual sum of 15,000 pounds to establish at the ICNC a high profile series of lectures entitled “The Heller Lecture Series in Computational Neuroscience”. This series of lectures continues today at the Edmond and [...]

Emily Mackevicius comes to work in the early morning because that’s when her birds are most likely to sing. A graduate student in the lab of McGovern Investigator Michale Fee, she is studying zebra finches, songbirds that learn to sing by copying their fathers. Bird song involves a complex and precisely timed set of movements, [...]

Award will support studies into how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors, with a focus on the songbird as a model system. Michale Fee, the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has received the Fundamental Science Investigator Award. Fee is the [...]

The School of Science recently announced the winners of its 2016 Teaching Prizes for Graduate and Undergraduate Education. The prizes are awarded annually to School of Science faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in teaching over the past several years. Winners are chosen from nominations by their students or [...]

Neuroscientists identify neural patterns birds use to learn their songs. Male zebra finches, small songbirds native to central Australia, learn their songs by copying what they hear from their fathers. These songs, often used as mating calls, develop early in life as juvenile birds experiment with mimicking the sounds they hear. [...]

MIT research provides new insights about trial-and-error learning Learning complex skills like playing an instrument requires a sequence of movements that can take years to master. Last year, MIT neuroscientists reported that by studying the chirps of tiny songbirds, they were able to identify how two distinct brain circuits [...]

MIT work with songbirds could aid study of humans’ timing As anyone who watched the Olympics can appreciate, timing matters when it comes to complex sequential actions. It can make a difference between a perfect handspring and a fall, for instance. But what controls that timing? MIT scientists are closing in on the brain [...]