What can math tell us about the mind? Our Center for Theoretical Neuroscience builds mathematical models of the brain that help explain everything from how its electrical activity remains stable to how memories are stored. Meet some of the scientists advancing this young field, using tools borrowed from physics, statistics and other disciplines.
TRANSCRIPT:
Tahereh Toosi: Theoretical neuroscience is about learning how the brain works, how neurons talk to each other, through in the lens of mathematics and physics.
Tuan Nguyen: Trying to understand the computational principles behind how the brain processes information and makes decisions.
Larry Abbott: We're in the mechanistic revolution of neuroscience. Getting to that basic how does it work level?
Daphna Shohamy: And there are more and more techniques and tools for measuring the brain. We're going to need theoretical neuroscience to help make sense of those massive amounts of data.
Christina Mingye Wang: Theory plays a unique role in helping us condense down from like terabytes of numbers into simple principles that are fundamental to intelligence.
Ken Miller: It's so much fun to be just immersed in this gigantic puzzle. But what we are, what makes us us what what's going on inside of us?
Lea Duncker: Some of aspects of the brain, especially biological brains, that really fascinate me is how brains can be flexible. So how can we flexibly adjust to a new situation continuously learn to do new things?
Tuan Nguyen: I study how we are able to see and perceive objects by the time we open our eyes, are born.
Christina Mingye Wang: I and a lot of people are excited about developing theories about our own brain to also help us make better AI and also understand how these AI systems work.
Larry Abbott: We try to do theory all the way from pulling things out of the raw data to building a conceptual model.
Lea Duncker: Models allow us to abstract away from some of the richness of the problem, to really distill a key statement around how it works.
Tuan Nguyen: We try to recreate aspects of the brains and ask, how is it that the brain is able to produce the responses or the patterns that we're seeing in the data?
Ken Miller: You need the model to get a new insight into an intuitive interaction between the neurons, how they behave, and how they work.
Daphna Shohamy: It really brings together our basic understanding of how cells work, how neural circuits are organized to the human experience of memory. Language, art.
Ashok Litwin-Kumar: If we are going to translate what we know about the brain to cures for disease, theory is a prerequisite.
