Pizza/NGU lecture november
Pizza/NGU lecture november

Speaker: Prof.dr. P.H.E. Tiesinga (Neuroinformatics, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud Universiteit)
Subject: Understanding brains: biology versus nanotechnology

A fundamental goal of neuroscience is to understand how the brain works in terms of the electrical activity of its celllular constituents. It is not clear whether simple principles, characteristic of physical theories, would emerge for brain circuits — it is more likely that we can only understand it by building it using multimodal data derived from experiment. For a long time computational modeling of the brain was  the only way of pursuing this approach. New developments in biology make possible so called brain-organoids, whereas progress in nanotechnology makes possible neuromorphic computing, both providing a means to build brains by physically modeling them in wet or hardware. The recent emergence of the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning provides yet another way to understand brains, but in terms of algorithms they might employ. I will discuss these different approaches to “build” brains in order to understand them and offer some  opinions on how to make most progress. I will focus on the problem of connectomics, determining the wiring diagram of the brain, and the dynamic circuit motifs at the cellular level that emerge in real brains, which could in turn make artificial brains smarter.

NGU lectures are about awesome fysics subjects and are organised by NGU (see website). As students we are welcome to join their lectures and we even get free pizza! If you want to eat pizza with use you need to register before 16:30 on the day of the lecture. Then at 18:45 there will be a FREE pizza waiting for you on the first floor (UK) of the KBG building! If you want to join us, but don't want to eat pizza, then don't register for this activity. But we will be happy to see you at the lecture.