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“The Maps Inside Your Head”-Vijay Balasubramanian

September 25, 2017 @ 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

Vijay Balasubramanian, University of Pennsylvania

“The Maps Inside Your Head”

Abstract: How do our brains make sense of a complex and unpredictable world? In this talk, I will discuss a physicist’s approach to the neural topography of information processing in the brain. First I will review the brain’s architecture, and how neural circuits map out the sensory and cognitive worlds. Then I will describe how highly complex sensory and cognitive tasks are carried out by the cooperative action of many specialized neurons and circuits, each of which has a simple function. I will illustrate my remarks with one sensory example and one cognitive example. For the sensory example, I will consider the sense of smell (“olfaction”), whereby humans and other animals distinguish vast arrays of odor mixtures using very limited neural resources. For the cognitive example, I will consider the “sense of place”, that is, how animals mentally represent their physical location. Both examples demonstrate that brains have evolved neural circuits that exploit sophisticated principles of mathematics – principles that scientists have only recently discovered.

 

Details

Date:
September 25, 2017
Time:
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm