Speaker
Codina & Scazzuso
Date/Time
Date(s) - 22/05/2023
11:00
Location
IRIS Building, Room 1.221
Tomás Codina
Title: From Neurons to Neural Population Dynamics
Abstract: Our brain consists of about 10^11 interacting neurons which are responsible for the computations and information processing happening at every moment in our life. Luckily, this huge system can be divided into regions. One of them is the frontal cortex, where neurons group in cortical columns, each of which contains thousands of neurons. Even though this number is several orders of magnitudes smaller than the one for the entire brain, microscopic models at this level, where each neuron is modeled explicitly, are still complex and lack mathematical tractability. A simplification comes by grouping cells with similar characteristics into populations. Here the coarse-grained activity of a population of neurons is modeled instead of single-neuron activity. In this presentation, we will introduce these models and focus on a particularly simple case where we have only one population. Despite the simplicity of this model, we will show how it serves to describe Up and Down dynamics, a coherent collective behavior occurring in our brains in the absence of any external stimuli.
Disclaimer: No alpha’-corrections will be mentioned in this talk!
and Davide Scazzuso
Title: KS theory and recursion
Abstract: Simple theories of quantum gravity in two dimensions have proven to be fruitful toy models where many problems can be analysed and fully solved. In this short talk I will introduce two-dimensional Kodaira-Spencer (KS) theory, which describes dynamical changes of spacetime topology in Jackiw-Teteilboim (JT) gravity. I will then show how the Schwinger-Dyson equations for KS theory are equivalent to topological recursion and explore the physical meaning of the latter.