Recent progress in the statistical physics of real neural networks

by Prof. William Bialek (Princeton University)

Wednesday 31 May 2023, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. Marconi)

Many of the most interesting phenomena in the brain emerge from interactions among hundreds or even thousands of neurons.  It is an old dream to use ideas from statistical physics to describe these phenomena.  New experimental methods for recording the electrical activity of more and more neurons simultaneously provide new opportunities to test this approach.  We will see that explicit Ising-like models can provide extraordinarily precise descriptions of ~100 cells, for example correctly predicting the ~100,000 triplet correlations in such networks within experimental errors. In a different direction,  recordings from 1000+ neurons allow us to explore new methods of data analysis inspired by the renormalization group, leading to the discovery of very precise and reproducible scaling behaviors.

Link zoom: https://uniroma1.zoom.us/j/82330282429?pwd=MktKdmlkSUxxdXlraFhKSHhJTDZnUT09