NIH VideoCast - The Maps Inside Your Head

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The Maps Inside Your Head

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Air date:	Monday, November 3, 2014, 12:00:00 PM Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
Views:	Total views: 500 (43 Live, 457 On-demand)
Category:	Neuroscience
Runtime:	01:08:59
Closed captioning:	Check box to display CC outside of the video Note: You can drag the captioning window around and resize it
Description:	Neuroscience Seminar Series Many of the most interesting functions and behaviors realized by the brain emerge from the collective activity of very large numbers of neurons of many functional types interacting in complex networks. The long-term goal of Dr. Balasubramanian's lab is to establish the principles underlying the structural and functional organization of such circuits in the brain. They hope to understand how large-scale behaviors can emerge from the interaction of many individual elements, what the constraints on neural circuit architecture are, and in what ways network functions can be impaired or improved by changes to the architecture. Some of their recent work focuses on the early visual system, especially the retina, which they treat as a prototypical brain area. With this example in mind, they have studied the underlying factors driving four characteristic aspects of circuit organization in the brain: (a) The diversity of cell types, and the division of scarce resources between these types, (b) The conserved patterns of structural and functional layout of circuitry, (c) functional adaptation to changing conditions, (d) computation and communication by networks. They propose that these structural and functional aspects of the organization of the early visual system can be understood as adaptations to efficiently process the information in natural scenes, subject to the metabolic, spatial, temporal and noise constraints inherent in biological computation. Ongoing experimental work in Dr. Balasubramanian's lab uses a multi-electrode array to study adaptation of the retinal network to changes in stimulus statistics. Ongoing theoretical work explores: (1) perception of visual texture and natural scene statistics, (2) the circuits underlying visual perception of shape, (3) location coding and goal-directed navigation using populations of place cells in hippocampus and grid cells in entorhinal cortex, (4) the organization of the olfactory system.

NLM Title:	The maps inside your head / Vijay Balasubramanian.
Author:	Balasubramanian, Vijay. National Institutes of Health (U.S.),
Publisher:
Abstract:	(CIT): Many of the most interesting functions and behaviors realized by the brain emerge from the collective activity of very large numbers of neurons of many functional types interacting in complex networks. The long-term goal of Dr. Balasubramanian's lab is to establish the principles underlying the structural and functional organization of such circuits in the brain. They hope to understand how large-scale behaviors can emerge from the interaction of many individual elements, what the constraints on neural circuit architecture are, and in what ways network functions can be impaired or improved by changes to the architecture.
Subjects:	Brain Mapping Brain--physiology Nerve Net
Publication Types:	Lecture Webcast

NLM Classification:	WL 300
NLM ID:	101647952
CIT Live ID:	14898
Permanent link:	https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=14898

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