Speaker: Associate Professor James Roberts
Affiliation: QIMR Berghofer

Abstract

It is a cliché to say that the brain is a complex system, but it is: a network of billions of diverse units interacting across spatial and temporal scales spanning many orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, brains are amenable to methods from physics to find lower-dimensional variables that capture the essence of many of the quantities we can measure. This talk will present an overview of mean field models of large-scale brain dynamics, in particular neural mass models and neural field theory. These explain a wide range of both healthy and pathological brain dynamics. Some more recent applications include brain waves that spontaneously reconfigure over time, and how models can be used to explore potential treatments for brain disorders.

 

About Physics colloquium

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Venue

Physiology Lecture Theatres (63)
Room: 358

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