Cortical Spatiotemporal Patterns and their Computational Roles

When:

21st May 2015

Time:

12 Noon

Where:

Melbourne VIC

Cost:

Free

Spatiotemporal activity in the cortex is organized into propagating waves with complex dynamics.

In this talk, Dr Pulin Gong, a CIBF associate investigator, will present new methods his group has developed that detect a range of complex wave patterns from multi-electrode array data. These wave forms include plane and spiral waves.

Pulin will also show how these propagating waves can explain the variability of neural spikes — sequences of action potentials — unifying two established but conflicting explanations.

Finally, Pulin will discuss how interacting spiking waves may underpin distributed dynamic computation in the cortex, and show how that computation can account for associative learning of temporally distant events.

Biography

Dr. Pulin Gong is a senior lecturer at University of Sydney, where he is the head of the Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Group. Before joining University of Sydney in 2009, Dr Gong was a staff scientist at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. Dr Gong’s research interests are in understanding the self-organizing mechanisms of spatiotemporal dynamics of neural circuits, and the principles of how these dynamics implement neural computation.

Date: 21 May 2015, 12 noon (a light lunch will be provided)

Venue: Auditorium, Monash Biomedical Imaging, 770 Blackburn Road, Clayton VIC 3800

Cost: Free (no need to register)

Enquiries: email enquiries@cibf.edu.au