Transcript seminario di fisica - Scuola Normale Superiore

SEMINARIO DI NEUROSCIENZE
Mercoledì 19 ottobre 2016
ore 12:00
Scuola Normale Superiore
Pisa
Sala Stemmi
Andreas Tolias
(Baylor College of Medicine)
terrà un seminario dal titolo:
“Structure, function and computations of neocortical
microcircuits”
Abstract:
The neocortex is responsible for human perception, cognition and action, and its malfunction underlies
numerous neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite major advances in our understanding of the functional properties of
single neurons we still do not know how the cortex works at the circuit level. The essence of the problem lies in
understanding how billions of neurons communicating through trillions of connections orchestrate their activities
to give rise to our mental faculties. We are far from being able to simultaneously measure the activity of all the
myriads of cortical cells and assemble their physical wiring diagram (whole brain connectome). However, if there
are underlying principles and rules that govern this complexity, these principles could reduce the impenetrable
complexity of the cortex to a manageable scale. One such principle is provided by the hypothesis that the cortex is
composed of repeated elementary information processing modules, organized along cortical columns. We combine
electrophysiological, imaging, and molecular tools with behavioral and machine learning approaches to determine
what constitutes the elementary computational circuit motif in the neocortex and characterize its structure, function
and decipher its canonical computation(s). I will describe our work towards those goals from three perspectives.
First, from an anatomical perspective where we are mapping the detailed wiring diagram of the canonical cortical
microcircuit including identifying all the cell types that comprise cortical circuits. Second, using multi-photon
imaging and electrophysiological methods we are characterizing the activity structure of large populations of
neurons in the visual cortex during behavioral tasks. Third, we are using machine-learning methods to model these
circuit motifs with the goal to decipher the canonical algorithm(s) they implement. Our goal is to compare different
cortical areas across species, which we hope will ultimately enable us to also understand the evolution of the
neocortical motif at the anatomical and computational level.
CLASSE DI SCIENZE
MATEMATICHE E NATURALI
Piazza dei Cavalieri, 7
56126 Pisa-Italy
tel: +39 050 509111
fax: +39 050 563513
12/10/2016