The effectiveness of therapies and preventive strategies for nervous system disorders relies on our ability to customize treatments to the unique needs of each individual. Digital twins of the nervous system have the potential to revolutionize precision medicine. As a result, one of the key research and innovation areas for advancing brain health is the development of digital twins for both...
“You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Francis Crick’s words encapsulate a core challenge in neuroscience: cracking the neural code. This challenge has been hindered by two major limitations: (1) our ability to record...
For years, neurons in visual cortex have been characterized in terms of simple feature dimensions such as orientation and spatial frequency. However, in recent years deep learning methods have set new standards in predicting the activity of neurons in visual cortex to arbitrary stimuli. Because of this property, these models are sometimes referred to as digital twins (DTs). Here we show how...
The fundamental structure of cortical networks arises early in development prior to the onset of sensory experience. However, how endogenously generated networks respond to the onset of sensory experience, and how they form mature sensory representations with experience remains unclear. Here we examine this ‘nature-nurture transform’ at the single trial level using chronic in vivo calcium...
Qualitative, cartoon-based understanding of physiological processes is not sufficient and needs to be taken to a deeper, quantitative (computational) level. Two types of computational models, namely statistical & mechanistic models, can be used to predict subcellular, cellular and supracellular phenomena in silico. This talk will mainly focus on mechanistic models. A simulation of a large...
Human intelligence and human consciousness emerge gradually during the process of cognitive development. Understanding this development is an essential aspect of understanding the human mind and may facilitate the construction of artificial minds with similar abilities. In this talk I will describe our lab's recent efforts to develop a digital twin of the developing human mind and body. To...
