OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
With technological advances in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, neuroscience of multi-regional brain-wide neural circuits is taking off. However, recent studies in this area have renewed the debate on local versus global neural representation and processing. Here, focusing on working memory (a core cognitive function), I will propose a mechanism for functional specificity in a cortex made of repeated canonical local circuits à la Kevan Martin and Rodney Douglas. First, I will introduce large-scale modeling of cortex based on connectomic data for monkeys and mice. Second, I will show that our model naturally gives rise to a hierarchy of timescales, and I will highlight macroscopic gradients of synaptic excitation and inhibition as a general principle of the large-scale cortical organization. Third, I will present our modeling of distributed working memory and simple decision-making. This line of work gives rise to the new concept of “bifurcation in space” to explain the emergence of functional modularity in a cortical system.
To join the talk on the day
us06web.zoom.us/j/88502753345?pwd=VnB3ZmY2Nlc5WE1YaGlqYWg2dnF0dz09
Meeting ID: 885 0275 3345
Passcode: 368450
