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Dr Ben Fulcher (Photo: supplied)

The brain as a complex dynamical system.

Hosted by: Dr Michael McCullough

Abstract

Like many systems in the world around us, the brain is a non-stationary complex physical system with intricate neural activity patterns that evolve through space and time. We now have unprecedented data on brain structure coupled with detailed recordings of brain activity dynamics. What quantitative representations of these dynamics best allow us to compute informative patterns that, for example, inform us about how the brain works (in health and disease)? In this talk I will introduce different ways of representing the brain as a complex dynamical system, and describe the associated time-series analysis methods that we have developed for quantifying these distributed dynamics, from individual brain areas through to distributed coupling patterns. I will make reference to some specific recent applications, including inferring dynamical biomarkers of psychiatric disease, computing low-dimensional representations of sleep dynamics, and tracking the cortical hierarchy of near-critical dynamics from noisy mouse-brain recordings.

Biography

Dr Ben Fulcher is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. His research develops and applies methods of physical modeling, nonlinear dynamical systems, and statistical learning to understand the organizational principles of complex systems. Applications of his methods have focused on explaining patterns in neural structure and function in terms of underlying physical mechanisms.