BI 216 Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen: The Nature of Brain Criticality
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Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen on critical brain dynamics and cognition, learning, and development.
BI 215 Xiao-Jing Wang: Theoretical Neuroscience Comes of Age
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Xiao-Jing was born and grew up in China, spent 8 years in Belgium studying theoretical physics like nonlinear dynamical systems and deterministic chaos.
BI 214 Nicole Rust: How To Actually Fix Brains and Minds
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Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders―and How We Can Change That. Nicole Rust runs the Visual Memory laboratory at UPenn, University of Pennsylvania. Her interests have expanded now to include mood and feelings, as you’ll hear. And she wrote this book, which contains a plethora of ideas about how we can pave a way forward in neuroscience to help treat mental and brain disorders. We talk about a small plethora of those ideas from her book. which also contains the story partially which will hear of her own journey in thinking about these things from working early on in visual neuroscience to where she is now.
BI 213 Representations in Minds and Brains
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What do neuroscientists mean when they use the term representation? That’s part of what Luis Favela and Edouard Machery set out to answer a couple years ago by surveying lots of folks in the cognitive sciences, and they concluded that as a field the term is used in a confused and unclear way.
BI 212 John Beggs: Why Brains Seek the Edge of Chaos
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You may have heard of the critical brain hypothesis. It goes something like this: brain activity operates near a dynamical regime called criticality, poised at the sweet spot between too much order and too much chaos, and this is a good thing because systems at criticality are optimized for computing, they maximize information transfer, they maximize the time range over which they operate, and a handful of other good properties.