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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Join us, Friday, December 17th, 2021, at 11 AM EST for an exciting virtual talk by Dr. Gustavo Deco entitled: “Turbulence in Human Brain Dynamics ” as part of the activities of the Brain Space Initiative, co-sponsored by the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) and the Data Science Initiative, IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Turbulence in Human Brain Dynamics
Turbulence is a special dynamical state driving many physical systems by way of its ability to facilitate fast energy/information transfer across scales. These qualities are important for brain function, but it is currently unknown if the brain also exhibits turbulence as a fundamental organisational principle. Using large-scale neuroimaging empirical data from 1003 healthy participants, we demonstrate amplitude turbulence in human brain dynamics. Furthermore, we build a whole-brain model with coupled oscillators to demonstrate that the best fit of our model to the data corresponds to a region of maximally developed amplitude turbulence, which also corresponds to maximal sensitivity to the processing of external stimulations (information capability). The model shows the economy of anatomy by following the Exponential Distance Rule of anatomical connections as a cost-of-wiring principle. This establishes a firm link between turbulence and optimal brain function. Overall, our results reveal a novel way of analysing and modelling whole-brain dynamics that for the first time ever establishes turbulence as a fundamental basic principle of brain organisation.
Biosketch: Gustavo Deco is Research Professor at the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) and Professor (Catedrático) at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) where he leads the Computational Neuroscience group. He is also Director of the Center of Brain and Cognition (UPF). In 1987 he received his PhD in Physics for his thesis on Relativistic Atomic Collisions. In 1987, he was a postdoc at the University of Bordeaux in France. From 1988 to 1990, he obtained a postdoc of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Giessen in Germany. From 1990 to 2003, he leads the Computational Neuroscience Group at Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich, Germany. He obtained in 1997 his Habilitation (maximal academical degree in Germany) in Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) at the Technical University of Munich for his thesis on Neural Learning. In 2001, he received his PhD in Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.
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