Events

The KLI support international groups of scholars in the life and sustainability sciences working on interdisciplinary projects to conduct their groundbreaking research at the institute.  KLI Focus Groups and Working Groups aim to develop ideas on a particular subject and generate suggestions for action. The participants have different scientific backgrounds and strive to develop specific, practical goals.  Focus Groups are one-time meetings gathering and working together at the KLI for a period of one to maximum two weeks. Working Groups comprise 3 meetings over the course of one year and a half.

Event Details

Altenberg Workshop
The Ground-Floor of Cognition: From Microbes to Animals and Plants
37th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology
2018-06-14 18:00 - 2018-06-17 14:00
KLI
Organized by Fred Keizer and Pamela Lyon

The Darwinian assumption that very simple organisms may yield principles critical to understanding the biology of Homo sapiens has led to monumental discoveries, yet the cognitive sciences have tended to resist this approach. Now an absence of theory has become a handicap, particularly in neuroscience. The workshop will examine organisms neglected by the cognitive sciences—unicellular organisms, plants and simple animals with and without nervous systems—to see if the mechanisms by which they sense and respond to the world can illuminate similar functions in more complex animals, including humans. We propose the ‘ground-floor’ of biocognition lies in cellular signaling, and predict that the patterns of activity in signal transduction networks found in social microbes and simple unicellular and multicellular eukaryotes can provide important clues to how cognition has evolved and how animal brains work.