Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
Healthy Aging: Maintaining a Healthy Brain
Speaker
Professor Kay Tye
Coordinator
Hiromi Imai-Dellario
Cognitive health includes memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and mental health factors like anxiety. In this talk, we will learn that social connections are important parts of keeping healthy brain functions. Social stimuli are among the most motivationally significant classes of stimuli that we encounter; impairments in social interactions are a hallmark feature of anxiety or mood disorders, as well as of substance use disorders. This conceptual framework is called “social homeostasis”.
Speaker Bio
Presenter: Kay Tye is Distinguished Professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. Her research explores how our social connections play a critical role in maintaining a healthy brain throughout our lives. Her laboratory finds mechanistic explanations for how these emotional and motivational states influence behavior in health and disease. She received her PhD in neuroscience from UC San Francisco.
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