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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 23: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems II (joint with BP)

DY 23.1: Topical Talk

Mittwoch, 13. März 2013, 15:00–15:30, H43

Challenges of Neurophysics — •Theo Geisel — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization & Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Universität Göttingen

As you are reading these lines, millions of neurons are activated in your brain and communicate by sending short pulses to each other. It is a major aim of neurophysics to understand the collective dynamics of large biological neural networks and to determine how they carry out complex computations. Recent progress of experimental techniques allows monitoring the activity of large numbers of cells in parallel and with single cell resolution even in freely moving animals. These techniques together with targeted optogenetic stimulation promise to considerably advance our insight into the function of collective neuronal dynamics in the near future.

On the other hand, these networks exhibit features that let them elude standard theoretical treatment: E.g. the units of the network interact asymmetrically and at discrete times only, i.e. not continuously as in conventional many-body theory in physics. There are significant interaction delays, which formally make the systems infinite-dimensional. Complex connectivities give rise to novel multi-operator problems, for which new methods based on graph theory are devised to reach rigorous analytic results. The talk reviews challenges and recent progress in characterizing the dynamics and function of these networks.