Naotaka Fujii

Naotaka Fujii is laboratory head of Laboratory for Adaptive Intelligence and unit leader of BTCC interactive brain communication unit at RIKEN since 2008.

He was granted MD in 1991 and PhD in 1997 at Tohoku University School of Medicine. He started his career as Ophthalmologist after graduating medical school and later switched to Neuroscientist. His first post-doctoral position was appointed in Graybiel lab at MIT, USA. At MIT, he conducted a research revealing neural mechanism of sequential oculomotor behavior in monkeys. Then, he moved back to Japan in 2004 and joined Dr. Iriki’s lab at RIKEN (Laboratory for Symbolic Cognitive Development) as deputy lab head and started studies of social brain function and development of interactive brain machine interface. He is a member of Society for Neuroscience, Japan society of neuroscience and Japan society of Physiology.

Naotaka is interested in Social Brain Function and Brain Machine Interface. He is trying to combine these two research topics to understand how we can make adaptive behavior. Especially development of interactive brain machine interface is the most important research theme for him. He is also interested in development of interactive virtual reality (VR) environment in which subject can make interactive communication as same as reality. In future, he is dreaming revealing human brain function by using interactive BMI and VR technologies.

Naotaka wrote several books. One of the books titled “SOCIAL BRAINS” was awarded The 63rd MAINICHI Publication and Culture Award in Natural Science Category.

Naotaka Fujii will present the following keynote lecture on Wednesday 25  August (9.00 - 10.00 am):

Multi-dimensional recording in social primates: method and application

Social brain function is a neural mechanism of communication that enables us to make social context dependent behaviors. The function has to deal with complex parameters in environment and behavior of surrounding others to select socially correct behavior at the moment. Thus learning the function also requires recording and analyzing multi-dimensional data which conventional physiological methods couldn’t handle.

To break such technical limitations in learning social brain function, we have developed multi-dimensional recording technique (MDR). MDR consists of two state of the art technologies, multi-electrode recording technique and motion-capture system. We can record neural activity from wide brain regions and precise motion data simultaneously as well as other biological parameters, like eye position, heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, muscle activity and etc, while the subject and other agents are freely behaving.

I will introduce detailed information of MDR and explain how we could apply the technique in Japanese macaque during social task.