Category Archives: Modeling

June 10

What is a topology and why is it in my neuroscience?!

[En Español] Time to go back to math class and into a world where a coffee mug and a donut are the same thing. If you ignore distances and shapes, and instead focus on continuity and relations, a donut can easily be morphed into a coffee mug, making them “topologically equivalent”. The hole is the […]

April 22

Neuromorphic engineering: how electronics are learning from the brain

[En Español] “As engineers, we would be foolish to ignore the lessons of a billion years of evolution” -Carver Mead Scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence that rivals what the human brain can do for centuries. The brain is remarkable in some computer-like aspects; it processes multiple complex tasks in parallel with high efficiency and […]

December 03

Meet Christopher Lee – Shape matters! Stories of a “model” scientist

What does Lotso, the bear from Pixar’s Toy Story 3, have in common with the research of computational scientist Dr. Christopher Lee? Lotso is created with a similar technology that Christopher uses to create real 3D models of neurons. For those who just started following this interview series, I am a researcher myself and conduct […]

December 27

The Trouble with Drug Development

Open a new tab, load up a science media site you know. What do you first see across the front page? You will almost certainly find a headline blaring “NEW FINDINGS SHOW AUTISM’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED” or “UNIVERSITY RESEARCHER CURES PARKINSON’S DISEASE”. Open the page up next week, and you will almost certainly see some […]

May 31

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Genetic Memory

We are all products of our past, for better or for worse. At first glance, such a statement seems so obvious it hardly bears mentioning; our earlier experiences, both our successes and our failures, shape our current behavior.  But dig just a bit deeper, and it becomes far murkier. What can you call your past? […]

March 31

Golden Retrievers, Terriers, and Artificial Neural Networks

Usually when someone tells you that they are studying something, it’d be safe to assume that they interact with whatever it is that they study. So you might be surprised to hear that there are neuroscientists who don’t spend much time manipulating and observing the dynamics within the physical brain of an organism or collecting […]

Ventral visual stream October 22

Deep neural networks help us read your mind.

If you let us, we can read your mind. For the last fifteen years or so, scientists have been able to use measurements of brain activity* to predict what image you’re seeing, what part of your body you’re moving, or whether you’ll remember something you were studying (See Norman et al. 2006 for a review). […]