Page 26 - ESTABLISHING THE INSTITUTE FOR BRAIN AND NEURAL SCIENCES

The neurons in our brain represent and transmit information using sequences of electrical impulses or ‘spikes.’ Understanding how information is carried by the spiking patterns of neurons is one of the fundamental quests of theoretical and computational neuroscience.
9 CENTER FOR THEORETICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
How do we unravel the basic principles of nerve cell communication and crack the underlying neural code?
26
•ensations, thoughts, and
S motor actions typically rely
on the joint activity of large groups
of neurons. The number of possible patterns created by the spiking or silencing of cells is astronomical. Moreover, neurons are notoriously unreliable and ‘noisy’ in in their responses, and so, although each neuron is mostly silent, with hundreds of billions of them, the brain’s communications networks are
highly noisy.
Weizmann Institute scientists from diverse areas such as physics, engineering, mathematics, and
computer science, will apply mathematical tools and sophisticated analyses to extract the signal, exclude the noise, and generate models of complex brain functions.
Research associated with this center will employ mathematical
tools taken from statistical physics, dynamic systems, machine learning and information theory to create
new models and theories of brain function. Through collaborations with experimental labs, these new theories and computational tools will be tested and refned for the beneft of the range of brain disorders and conditions.