by Prof. William Bialek, Princeton University
When: May 8, 2025, at 3:00 pm
Where: Sala Seminari VIMM (Fondazione per la Ricerca Biomedica Avanzata Onlus, Via Orus 2, Padova)
Abstract: Thoughts, memories, percepts, and actions all involve coordinated activity in thousands of neurons. We can now observe these patterns of activity directly in the brains of model organisms, and there are many ideas about the emergence of collective behavior in these large networks.
This talk will review recent progress in connecting theory and experiment, emphasizing concepts from statistical physics: maximum entropy models, the renormalization group, mean-field theories, and more. We will see that these relatively simple physics-style models capture myriad quantitative details in many different systems, in some cases with essentially no free parameters.
These analyses also point to scaling behavior as networks become larger, and these may be related to recent observations on scaling in animal behavior.