Seminar Description
Suspicious Coincidences in the Brain
Terrence J. Sejnowski
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
University of California, San Diego
February 24, 2012
2:00 - 3:00 pm
Davis Auditorium, Fletcher Allen
Summary
Brains need to make quick sense of massive amounts of ambiguous information with minimal energy costs and have evolved an intriguing mixture of analog and digital mechanisms to allow this efficiency. Analog electrical and biochemical signals inside neurons are used for integrating synaptic inputs from other neurons. The digital part is the all-or-none action potential, or spike, that lasts for a millisecond or less and is used to send messages over a long distance. Spike coincidences occur when neurons fire together at nearly the same time. In this lecture I will show how rare spike coincidences can be used efficiently to represent important visual events and how this architecture can be implemented with analog VLSI technology to simplify the early stages of visual processing.
Speaker Bio
Terrence Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at The Salk
Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational
Neurobiology Laboratory, an Investigator with the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute, and a Professor of Biology and Computer Science
and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego,
where he is Co-Director of the Institute for Neural Computation.
The long-range goal of Dr. Sejnowski's laboratory is to understand the
computational resources of brains and to build linking principles
from brain to behavior using computational models. This goal is
being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental
approaches at several levels of investigation ranging from the
biophysical level to the systems level. His laboratory has developed
new methods for analyzing the sources for electrical and magnetic signals
recorded from the scalp and hemodynamic signals from functional brain imaging
by blind separation using independent components analysis (ICA).
Dr. Sejnowski has published over 300 scientific papers and 12 books,
including The Computational Brain, with Patricia Churchland. He received
the Wright Prize for Interdisciplinary research in 1996, the Hebb Prize
from the International Neural Network Society in 1999, and the IEEE Neural
Network Pioneer Award in 2002. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2000,
an AAAS Fellow in 2006, to the Institute of Medicine in 2008, the
National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and the National Academy of
Engineering in 2011.
