Brains on Fire

title What Forest Fires Tell Us About the Brain
description Seminar by a rare female in the field of computational neuroscience. Abstract: "The dynamics of large networks of spiking neurons resembles closely that of forest fires. During such events forests contain green, burned and burning trees; likewise neural networks contain sensitive, refractory and activated neurons. We show how models of neuronal activity, both as standard forest fires as well as networks of integrate and fire neurons, are capable of displaying a variety of interesting behavior. These include long-range, power law temporal correlations in the inter-spike interval histograms, criticality, stochastic resonance in the noise driven appearance of spirals of neural activity, traveling waves, and localized clusters of activated and refractory neurons which move around. Although mean field analysis is sufficient for the characterization of population behavior away from criticality, the analysis at the critical state requires the methods of statistical neural field theory to explicitly incorporate the effects of fluctuations." My cell phone records better quality video than this, and most of the audience questions are inaudible, but it's still an interesting talk.
producer Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
featuring Tanya Baker
format Flash, MPEG4
date 05/12/06
length 01:23:30
link http://www.archive.org/details/Redwood_Center_2006_12_05_Tanya_Baker
direct video link http://www.archive.org/download/Redwood_Center_2006_12_05_Tanya_Baker/Redwood_Center_2006_12_05_Tanya_Baker_64kb.mp4 or the shorter URL http://tinyurl.com/2q7x69

Tags: webcast brain neuroscience computational_neuroscience fires