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Paul Richard Adams, FRS is a neuroscientist currently serving as a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University in New York.

He graduated from London University with a PhD, and did postdoctoral work with Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute. He won the Novartis Memorial Prize in 1979 and the Gaddum Memorial Award in 1984, both from the British Pharmacological Society. He was made a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellow in 1986, and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991. From 1987 to 1995 he was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

With others, he pioneered the concepts of open channel block and neuromodulation, which now play central roles in neuroscience. He is now working on a theory about the neocortex, centering on the idea that sophisticated learning requires extremely specific synaptic strength adjustments. He (working with Kingsley Cox) has proposed that this problem could be overcome, in the neocortex, by a process called “Hebbian proofreading”, using some neurons (e.g. in layer 6) as detectors of correlated activity between other neurons (e.g. in thalamus and upper layers), which then edit recent plasticity at the corresponding thalamocortical synapses.

Patents

• Neuromorphic Device for Proofreading Connection Adjustments in Hardware Artificial Neural Networks

References

1. "Paul R. Adams Professor". Archived from the original on 19 May 2011. Retrieved 28 October 2010.
2. "Paul Adams, PhD - Professor, Neurobiology and Behavior". Archived from the original on 11 June 2010. Retrieved 28 October 2010.
3. Lester, H. A. (1992). "The Permeation Pathway of Neurotransmitter-Gated Ion Channels". Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure. 21: 267–292. doi:10.1146/annurev.bb.21.060192.001411. PMID 1381975.
4. Phillips, Matthew B.; Nigam, Aparna; Johnson, Jon W. (2020). "Interplay between Gating and Block of Ligand-Gated Ion Channels". Brain Sciences. 10 (12): 928. doi:10.3390/brainsci10120928. PMC 7760600. PMID 33271923.
5. Brown DA, Adams PR (February 1980). "Muscarinic suppression of a novel voltage-sensitive K+ current in a vertebrate neurone". Nature. 283 (5748): 673–6. Bibcode:1980Natur.283..673B. doi:10.1038/283673a0. PMID 6965523. S2CID 4238485
6. The discovery of the sub-threshold currents M and Q/H in central neurons P Adams Brain research 1645, 38-41
7. J Theor Biol . 1998 Dec 21;195(4):419-38. doi: 10.1006/jtbi.1997.0620
8. Hebbian learning from higher-order correlations requires crosstalk minimization KJA Cox, PR Adams Biological cybernetics 108 (4), 405-422
9. Elliott T (2002) From synaptic errors to thalamocortical circuitry. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6: 147–148
10. Adams PR, Cox KJA (2002) A new interpretation of thalamocortical circuitry. Phil Trans Roy Soc B 357: 1767–1779.
11. Adams, P. R., and K. J. A. Cox. "A neurobiological perspective on building intelligent devices." Neuromorphic Eng 3.1 (2006): 2-8.

External links

• Adams's page at the Stony Brook Neurobiology Department
• Adams's page at Stony Brook's Pharmacology site
• Adams's CV on his Synaptic Darwinism site

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