Dear All,
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Center for Cognitive Computation (CCC) invite you to the upcoming event of the
Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum. Please note that there will be two talks consecutively.
Titles and abstracts:
Whole-brain modelling. Cartography of eudaimonia and flourishing in the human brain
In order to survive, the brain must constantly extract, predict and recognise the essential
spacetime features of complex environments. This distributed computation of information
relies on having a hierarchy of optimal information transfer across the whole brain at the
lowest possible metabolic cost. Suboptimal brain orchestration has been linked to mental
illness, yet the fundamental principles of brain orchestration over fast and slow timescales are
still not well understood. I will show how significant progress has been made using whole-
brain modelling of neuroimaging data using new frameworks based on stochastic
thermodynamics and turbulence. A series of studies have already furthered our understanding
of human flourishing using data from experiments including music, food, social interactions,
meditation and psychedelics. Overall, this new evidence has given rise to a deeper
understanding of experiences that can give rise to both flourishing and suffering, providing
meaning and purpose to life, and may eventually help to find novel ways to rebalance the
brain in neuropsychiatric disorders.
The computing brain: Explaining cognition through a realistic whole-brain anatomically constrained-reservoir model
The perhaps most important unsolved problem in neuroscience is how the brain survives in a
complex world by performing a rich repertoire of computation on a minimal energy budget.
The brain is much better at adapting to the multiplicity of stimuli and outcomes than current
generations of computers, artificial neural deep learning and reservoir model architectures.
Yet, at first glance the brain appears to use a fixed anatomical architecture to perform the
necessary huge variety of computations. But evolution’s boldest trick is that in fact
the brain’s effective connectivity is constantly being updated through neuromodulation to
allow the rich repertoire of computation. Inspired by this, we created a whole-brain model
using empirical neurotransmitter maps modulating the underlying local regional dynamics.
This NEMO (neurotransmission modulated) whole-brain model is able to flexibly compute
the full task repertoire and associated functional connectivity of the neuroimaging data from
971 healthy participants. For each individual we defined a measure of ‘brain computability’
as the fitting of the NEMO whole-brain model to all tasks performed by the individual.
Importantly, brain computability correlates with both behavioural performance on individual
tasks and with a general behavioural measure of intelligence. Overall, our proposed unifying
NEMO framework offers a natural way to sculpt different brain dynamics in a fixed brain
architecture to compute the rich repertoire of tasks required for surviving and thriving.
Date and time: February 27, Friday, 10:00 am
Location: CEU Budapest Site (1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 15.) room 101. Quantum
Should you have any inquiries about the series, please contact
Mihály
Bányai.
Please be informed that video/photo recording might take place at the event and the edited version of the video material might be published to communicate or promote CEU's activities. Please, find our Privacy Notice
here.
Best regards,
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Ildikó Varga
Department Coordinator (Budapest)
Department
of Cognitive Science
Pronouns: she/her | vargai@ceu.edu | +36 1 327 3000 2941
H-1051 Budapest, Nádor street 15. FT 404
CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY
Quellenstrasse 51 | A-1100 Vienna | Austria | www.ceu.edu
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