Brain Talk: Simo Vanni

Our forebrain is central to our cognitive behavior, but we have not yet been able to build a functional model system of the thalamus and cerebral cortex. In this talk, we introduce theoretical and computational neuroscience and examine how modeling primate object vision might help us to reach this goal. The path to a functional model of thalamocortical dynamics faces three main challenges: learning to see, bridging neural membrane voltage to computations at distinct scales, and validating our model. Overcoming these challenges would help us to better understand how nature achieves energy efficiency, noise tolerance, and robustness against unit loss and input variability.