Making waves in the brain - Terry Sejnowski

Special Seminar Series in Theoretical/Computational Neuroscience

Making waves in the brain Terry Sejnowski, PhD

 

Francis Crick Chair, Professor and Laboratory Head Salk Institute of Biological Sciences

Abstract: Traveling waves of electrical activity have been observed in the hippocampus and cortex, but their origin and function is unknown.  Two recent studies will be presented on 10-14 Hz cortical circular traveling waves during sleep spindles in humans and 4-10 Hz cortical traveling waves in awake and behaving monkeys.  They point toward a new class of globally organized activity in the brain.

Bio: Dr. Terrence Sejnowski received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and the Harvard Medical School. He served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and was a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech. He is now an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies.  He is also a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he is co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation and co-director of the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. 

Sejnowski is a pioneer in computational neuroscience and his goal is to understand the principles that link brain to behavior. His laboratory uses both experimental and modeling techniques to study the biophysical properties of synapses and neurons and the population dynamics of large networks of neurons. New computational models and new analytical tools have been developed to understand how the brain represents the world and how new representations are formed through learning algorithms for changing the synaptic strengths of connections between neurons. He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain with Patricia Churchland.