WNCG Seminar Series: Coding-Theoretic Questions in Neuroscience

The brain is simultaneously a biological object and a computing machine that represents and stores information about the external world, computes with this information, and generates adaptive behaviors in the world. Modern neuroscience is bringing sophisticated tools to observe neural codes. Our actual understanding of these codes is at a nascent stage, and opportunities to understand how the brain codes information and why it does so the way is does, abound. I'll talk about some fascinating neural codes and our work to theoretically analyze these codes. Finally, I'll try to convince you that the brain poses some particularly interesting coding-theoretic questions because all codes must be generated and decoded in a dynamical framework.