Beyond the canon: temporal and spatial multiscale organization in cortex

Wed July 22, 2015 9:00-17:30 Prague Czech

Organizers:

Bill Lytton (SUNY, KCHC Brooklyn; billl@neurosim.downstate.edu)

Wim van Drongelen (U Chicago; wvandron@peds.bsd.uchicago.edu)

Abstract: In addition to new knowledge, recent years have brought a growing appreciation of the complexity of cortical organization across temporal and spatial scales, requiring a reconceptualization of prior models. We can no longer think of cells simply as independent distinct processing entities that can be slotted into circuitry and governed by a clock, in the way that transistors are placed into and driven by a circuit board.

Indeed, there is an intriguing overlapping of scales in cortex. Spatially, cell and network scales are dramatically intermixed in e.g. layer 5 pyramidal cells: these apical dendrites reach upward across layers of circuit wiring, receiving dynamically distinct inputs and making dynamically distinct subcellular responses at different circuit layers. Temporally, feedforward and feedback circuits are not distinct but interact with and through different cortical layers (and cells and dendrites), with responses at different temporal scales governed by imposed and intrinsic oscillations ranging from milliseconds (fast gamma) to seconds (sub-delta). Here again the activity of individual cells or subcircuits cannot be abstracted from this complex of multiscale activity. Rather than thinking hierarchically up the great chain of embeddings (molecule to spine to dendrite to cell to circuit to area ...), we may need to transform to a different representational frame. Perhaps one can begin to identify distinct spatiotemporal functional/dynamical modes that manifest across scales.

9:00 Bill Lytton (SUNY Downstate, USA) Multiscale or beyond?

9:30 Gaute Einevoll (NMBU, Norway) Bridging scales with local field potentials (LFPs)

10:00 Coffee Break

10:30 Wim van Drongelen (U Chicago, USA) Interactions between LFP rhythms: how they become visible at the macroscopic scale

11:00 Jorge Mejias (NYU, USA) Large-scale cortical network models with laminar structure: frequency-specific feedforward and feedback interactions

11:30 Maxim Bazhenov (UC Riverside, USA) Sleep Slow Oscillation And Memory Consolidation

12:00 Lunch

2:00 Giorgio Ascoli (George Mason, USA) Much ADO about BIG memory: A neural mechanism for Background Information-Gated learning based on Axonal-Dendritic Overlaps

2:30 Eilif Muller (Human Brain Project, Switzerland) Large-scale simulations of Somatosensory Cortex

3:00 Coffee Break

3:30 Stefan Mihalas (Allen Inst., USA) Multi-scale approaches to elucidating the computations of a cortical column

4:00 Cathy Schevon (Columbia U, USA) Spatial properties of evolving seizures : what we can learn from human microelectrode recordings

4:30 Jack Cowan (U Chicago, USA) Towards a mathematical representation of the functional architecture of neocortical regions