Seeing into the future: Proactive adjustments of visual coding by the circadian clock

Almost all organisms use an in-built circadian clock to confine key aspects of their physiology and behaviour to particular times of day. This maximises their ability to thrive and survive through the changing demands of day-night cycle. I have recently found that circadian control extends to adjusting how the brain encodes and processes information from the sensory environment. I aim to determine how biological clocks adjust neural networks to change how they function in anticipation of a change in the environment, and to reveal how this ensures the brain works at its best across the day. This work has wide-ranging implications for the understanding of brain function, and will reveal how disruptions to our biological clock (as often occurs in our 24-hr society) might impact the complexity and power of the brain.