Connectionists: Bernstein 2017 Workshop, "The Neural Code: Universal Grammar or Area-Specific Mechanisms?"

[Hazem Toutounji]

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
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