“The Maps Inside Your Head,” a free informal public dialogue, given by Professor Vijay Balasubramanian, University of Pennsylvania, at 5:30 PM Thursday, August 14th at the Aspen Center for Physics, 6th and Gillespie. How do our brains make sense of a complex and unpredictable world and how do physicists try to understand neural topography? Professor Balasubramanian will review the brain’s architecture and use a sensory and cognitive example to explain neural maps. The sensory example will be the sense of smell, olfaction,” whereby humans and other animals distinguish vast arrays of odor mixtures using very limited neural resources. For the cognitive example, he will consider the sense of place,” that is, how animals mentally represent their physical location. Both examples demonstrate that brains have evolved neural circuits that exploit sophisticated principles of mathematics – principles that scientists have only recently discovered.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:09:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015