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Thursday, 20 March 2025 |
Video-Recording for any system with MP4-support - Video.mp4 (ca. 444 Mb) |
15:15 – 16:40 |
"How the brain maps space"
Speaker:
Prof. Vijay Balasubramanian
(Upenn & Oxford)
Abstract:
Space is a concept that is fundamental to
all branches of physics; it is also
central to neuroscience. Indeed, animal
life is defined by the ability to navigate
in space. Humans think not only about
physical space but also about abstract
spaces that allow us to geometrize complex
problems. Inside our heads,
the brain represents space as a pattern of
neural firing, produced and
maintained by circuits in a group of brain
regions called the
"hippocampal formation."
In this talk, I will describe progress
towards a theory of organization of the
circuits and systems that build the
brain's internal description of space.
I will compare the predictions of theory
to experimental data, and discuss
how the brain self-organizes to produce a
cognitive map: a way of imagining
location in physical and abstract spaces.
About the Speaker:
Vijay Balasubramanian received
undergraduate degrees in Physics and
Computer Science from MIT, a master's
degree in Computer Science from
MIT, and a PhD in Physics from Princeton
University. He was a Junior Fellow
of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and
then joined the Physics faculty at the
University of Pennsylvania where he is now
the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor.
He has held visiting positions at the
Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris;
Vrije Universiteit Brussels; and is an
External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute.
In the 2024-2025 academic year he is the
George Eastman Professor at the
University of Oxford. He has worked on problems across the full
range of
inquiry in theoretical physics, from the
black hole information paradox to the biophysics of neural circuits. He is broadly interested in how physical
systems
create, transform, and process
information.