Neurophysics: revealing the emergence of cognition from the collective dynamics of interacting neurons

Remarkable advances in experimental neuroscience now enable us to simultaneously observe and perturb the activity of many neurons, thereby providing an unprecedented opportunity to understand how the moment by moment collective dynamics of the brain instantiates cognition.  We will review some of our recent work in this area focusing on examples in which statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and pattern formation theory elucidate fundamental principles governing relations between cognition and neural dynamics, ranging from fundamental limits on perception to neural circuits underlying navigation.

Speaker: Surya Ganguli, Stanford University