Seminars & Colloquia

Driven by inhibitions: The attention problem

Jorge V. Jose
Center for the Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems, and
Physics Department,
Northeastern University, Boston
23 April 4:00 pm Higgins 310

One of the important properties of the behavior of the nervous system, discovered by Adrian (1950), is the synchronization of neuronal discharges. In recent years the advent of improved experimental techniques has provided vast amounts of new synchronization data that needs of a quantitative analysis. Concomitantly, there has been a resurgence in interest and controversy concerning the functional relevance of synchronization for brain information coding. In this talk I will introduce the main neurobiology concepts necessary to undersand the results of our mathematical modeling of synchronicity in the brain. I will then put forth our hypothesis that synchronicity in neuronal discharges is important in explaining the "attention" paradigm.