Rutgers Network Neuroscience Interest Group: Andrea Luppi, PhD
“Competitive interactions shape brain dynamics and computation across species”
Speaker: Andrea Luppi, PhD
Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK
Division of Information, Engineering, University of Cambridge
Date and Time: Friday, October 30th at 1:00 PM
Zoom: https://rutgers.zoom.us/my/lp756?pwd=Y3Q1NTNGTFJibHpYcUUwYUNaaFg5UT09
In-person: SRB seminar room
Abstract: Adaptive cognition relies on cooperation across anatomically distributed brain circuits. However, specialised neural systems are also in constant competition for limited processing resources. How does the brain’s network architecture enable it to balance these cooperative and competitive tendencies? Here we use computational whole-brain modelling to integrate multimodal structural and functional data, and examine the dynamical and computational relevance of cooperative and competitive interactions in the mammalian connectome. Across human, macaque, and mouse we show that the architecture of the models that most faithfully reproduce brain activity, consistently combines modular cooperative interactions with diffuse, long-range competitive interactions. The model with competitive interactions consistently outperforms the cooperative-only model, with excellent fit to both spatial and dynamical properties of the living brain, which were not explicitly optimised but rather emerge spontaneously. Competitive interactions in the effective connectivity produce greater levels of synergistic information and local-global hierarchy, and lead to superior computational capacity when used for neuromorphic computing. Altogether, this work provides a mechanistic link between network architecture, dynamical properties, and computation in the mammalian brain.
The Rutgers network neuroscience interest group brings together researchers interested in understanding the organization of brain structure and function through the lens of network science. We view this field broadly and encourage participation from researchers working with both preclinical and human data and at different scales of analysis, including both mesoscale (involving populations of neurons) and macroscale (involving different brain regions).
The interest group is sponsored by Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research (CAHBIR) and the Cognitive And Sensory Neuroscience Focus Area Working Group of the BHI.
If you have questions about the interest group, please email Dr. Linden Parkes (linden.parkes@rutgers.edu) or Dr. David Zald (david.zald@rutgers.edu)
