Cosyne 2008 Workshops
March 3-4, 2008
Snow Bird, Utah
Workshop Title
Top down or bottom up? measuring, modeling and understanding cross-scale neural interactions
Organizers
Tim Blanche (UC Berkeley): timblanche{at}fastmail{dot}fm
Kilian Koepsell (UC Berkeley): kilian{at}berkeley{dot}edu
Abstract
The brain functions on multiple spatial and temporal scales spanning several orders of magnitude. Most experimental neuroscientists and theoreticians study the brain at a single scale, regarding lower scales as 'implementational detail' and higher scales as phenomena to explain using the scale under study. While much progress has been made using this approach, the success of this paradigm rests on the assumption that the process or mechanism being studied at one scale operates largely independently of lower and higher scales, despite the fact that descriptions at different scales are the same thing at different resolutions. The central themes of this workshop are thus: to what extent can overall brain function be understood one scale at a time? What has been learned by measuring and modeling brain processes across scales? Is there an optimal scale to model brain function? What are the correlational dependencies across levels in neural data? What information is processed at a given scale, how much redundancy is there, and what are the upward and downward flows of information across time?
These are not new questions, but the data and tools emerging to answer them are. Our invited speakers use experimental and theoretical techniques that give a window on brain dynamics from single neurons to whole brains, modeling data obtained from whole cell recordings, implantable multi-electrode arrays, high-density EEG and epidural electrode arrays, fMRI, and MEG. The risk with such a workshop is that it becomes a series of loosely connected talks. We hope to avoid this veritable "Tower of Babel" by having speakers whose research endeavors explicitly span two or more scales of measurement and analysis:
Workshop Program
| Morning session | ||
| 8:00 | Tim Blanche | Welcome |
| 8:10 | Kilian Koepsell | Spike timing in the context of network dynamics from retina to cortex. |
| 8:50 | Ryan Canolty | Tracking multi-scale interactions between distinct brain regions during complex behavior. |
| 9:30 | Charles Schroeder | Hierarchically coupled neuronal oscillations as instruments in bottom-up and top-down processing. |
| 10:10 | Break | |
| 10:30 | Tony Bell | Levels, loops and neural learning. |
| Discussion session | ||
| 11:00 | Discussion session led by Tony Bell. | |
| Afternoon session | ||
| 4:30 | David McCormick | Intracortical Network Dynamics and Control of Neuronal Gain. |
| 5:10 | Pascal Fries | Communication through coherence: A mechanism for dynamic gain change. |
| 5:50 | Break | |
| 6:10 | Jean-Philippe Lachaux | Long-range synchrony in the gamma band : evidence from intracerebral recordings in humans. |
| 6:50 | Peter Robinson | Multiscale brain dynamics: Toward a first-cut 'working brain' model. |
