Events Calendar

Biomedical Engineering Department Guest Speaker

Speaker: Lyle Muller, Postdoctoral Fellow, Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Talk Title: Traveling waves in cortex: spatiotemporal dynamics shape perceptual and cognitive processes

Abstract: With new multichannel recording technologies, neuroscientists can now record from cortex with high spatial and temporal resolution. Early recordings during anesthesia revealed spontaneous and stimulus-evoked waves traveling across the cortex. While for a long time these waves were thought to disappear in awake animals and during normal sleep, our recent work has revealed traveling waves in these complex activity states. Their overall role in neural computation, however, remains poorly understood.
In my research, we have introduced new computational methods for detection and quantification of spatiotemporal patterns in noisy multisite recordings. At the scale of a single cortical region, these methods have revealed that small visual stimuli consistently evoke waves traveling from the point of input to primary visual cortex in the awake monkey (Muller et al., Nature Communications 5, 2014). At the whole-brain scale, the 11-15 Hz sleep "spindle", a brain oscillation causally implicated in consolidation of long-term memory, is consistently organized as a rotating wave traveling in a preferred direction (Muller et al., eLife 5, 2016). These results indicate that traveling waves play a role in organizing neural activity during multiple behavioral states. In upcoming work, we aim to address the network-level mechanisms generating traveling waves and complex spatiotemporal patterns, under the general aim of understanding their role in neural computation.
Hosted by:

Host: Francisco Valero-Cuevas, PhD

Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145/145A

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta