IISER MOHALI

Abstract: How do brains work ? As in other complex systems, the fascinating properties of nervous systems cannot be simply reduced to an enumeration of its components but arise as emergent features resulting from interactions between hundreds to a few hundred billion neurons (depending on whether one is looking at the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans or a human brain, respectively). What does this network of connections - much of which appears to be hard-wired at development - contribute to the function of the brain ? Is it possible to discern an overall structural organization that is invariant across species having nervous systems ? Research in our group has recently shown evidence for a hierarchical modular arrangement at different scales in the brain. This design motif, that has a clear functional interpretation in terms of information processing, helps present an unified view of how structure leads to function in the brain.

About the Speaker: Sitabhra Sinha (https://www.imsc.res.in/~sitabhra/), a Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, is widely known for his diverse research interests spanning complex systems, nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics with applications to systems biology, economic & social sciences and computational linguistics He is currently the Dean of the Computational Biology Graduate Program at the IMSc, and has been adjunct faculty of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore and the Department of Computer Science, IIT Kharagpur. He did his PhD on chaotic neural networks at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and postdoctoral research, at the interface of Physics & Biology, in the Department of Physics of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and later in the Division of Cardiology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York City, USA. He joined the faculty of IMSc in 2002.