On August 30th and 31st, 2015, I put my brain to the test. I spent the two days immersing myself in brain informatics at the 2015 International Brain Informatics and Health Conference in London, writing for the event blog.
The event was hosted at the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington, London, which tuned out to be the perfect location for an event that mostly concerned itself with mapping the brain. Geography collides with neuroscience gives a quick introduction to the event, merging geographical and neuroscientific mapping concepts.
Neuromorphic engineers and mapping the brain is a post based on a series of talks during a workshop by different neuromorphic engineers. I had never come across the term so wanted to know what they were!
One of the biggest challenges neuroscientists have when trying to understand the brain is that they don’t understand what all its different parts are or how they relate to each other. Classifying neurons: A periodic solution, looks into a potential solution to this problem, by mimicking the Period Table of the Elements, but for neurons instead. It was an introductory post for one of the main feature talks on Tuesday September 1st 2015.
As well as finding a way to arrange and order all the different cell types, it’s equally important to find out what they are, how they connect and how these connections lead to behaviour and cognition. From cells to connections to cognition explores these three things, based on two of the main speeches on Monday August 31st.
Finding meaning in big data, a post based on Paul Verschure’s talk at the end of Monday August 31st, explores how there’s a missing link between observation-based science and theory-based science. Verschure is trying to fix this link by finding a computational way to analyse data based on human interactions with it.