Dear Colleagues,

We would like to draw your attention to the upcoming workshop

The Neural Code: Universal Grammar or Area-Specific Mechanisms?

at the Bernstein Conference 2017, which will take place preceding the conference on September 12-13 in Göttingen, Germany.

Abstract:

The brain responds to sensory stimuli with complex, yet structured, patterns of action potentials, which in turn gives rise to perception, action, remembrance and other facets of the organism's mental life. Finding order in the complexity of neural activity, and the quest for the neural code, occupied much of both experimental and theoretical neuroscience in the last decades. Several general theories of how the brain might encode and transfer information have been suggested, partly backed by experimental evidence. Attractor dynamics, binding by synchrony, brain oscillations acting at multiple temporal scales and Bayesian coding are some of the more prominent proposals into this direction. The debate whether these strategies are different facets of a fundamental neural grammar, or are local codes within functionally distinct brain regions, is far from settled. The aim of the workshop is to bring together experts in the field of neural coding, in order to discuss basic mechanisms of information encoding and the deeper question of whether there is a unifying grammar of neural representations.

Schedule:

Tue, Sept 12, 2017
13:00	Damian Battaglia, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France Do oscillations modulate information processing? From routing states to computing modes
13:45	Mattia Rigotti, Physical Sciences Department, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY Functional role of the dimensionality of neural responses
14:30	General discussion
15:00	Coffee Break
15:30	Máté Lengyel, University of Cambridge, UK A sampling-based neural code of uncertainty in V1 (and I bet elsewhere, too)
16:15	Nicolas Brunel, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA Statistics of connectivity in networks optimizing information storage: fixed point attractors vs sequences
17:00	Misha Tsodyks, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel Population spikes codes for processing and working memory
17:45	General discussion

Wed, Sept 13, 2017
9:00	Stefano Panzeri, Neural Computation Laboratory, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy The relationship between cross-cell coupling and the timescales of population coding across cortex
9:45	Thilo Womelsdorf, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA Neural coding and inter-areal integration of goal-relevant information using spike bursts
10:30	Coffee break
11:00	Pascal Fries, Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience in Cooperation with Max Planck Society, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Rhythms for Cognition: Communication through Coherence
11:45	Genaral discussion

Kind regards,

Eleonora Russo and Hazem Toutounji

Dr. rer. nat. Hazem Toutounji

Postdoctoral Researcher in Theoretical Neuroscience
Central Institute of Mental Health

Medical Faculty Mannheim of Heidelberg University

Square J5, 68159 Mannheim, Germany

office: +49-621-1703-2366