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SUMMARY:The brain as a changing operating environment - Charles Micou\, Un
 iversity of Cambridge
DTSTART:20260226T140000Z
DTEND:20260226T150000Z
UID:TALK245071@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jan Maciejowski
DESCRIPTION:Brains allow us to change how we behave. We can adopt new stra
 tegies to forage for food\, learn new motor skills to reach new places\, a
 nd remember all those occasions on which we failed in our endeavours to im
 prove our odds of success in the future. Ongoing changes in how the brain 
 assimilates and represents information make it a challenging operating env
 ironment\, both for clinical interventions like brain-machine interfaces\,
  and for those systems internal to the brain that aim to produce consisten
 t behaviour. This talk presents an overview of three projects connected to
  this problem. We outline the design of a brain-machine interface for cont
 rol of navigation through a virtual maze and describe how the use of this 
 interface interacts with and alters neural representations within CA1 hipp
 ocampus\, an extremely plastic brain region associated with episodic memor
 y and spatial memory. Next\, we present an information-theoretic argument 
 for why reconfigurations of neural populations should proceed by increment
 ally applying dramatic changes to a small number of neurons at a time\, ra
 ther than by gradually changing all neurons at once. Finally\, we discuss 
 the feasibility of measuring ongoing changes in human behaviour and proble
 m-solving through a massively-online field experiment\, and present some p
 reliminary results that mirror the statistics of ongoing changes in neural
  representations.\n 
LOCATION:LR5\, Department of Engineering.
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