Category: Journal club
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A presentation on mouse vision
We had a lab meeting on Thursday, and it was my turn to present. Since I’m waiting for data to come through, I didn’t have original research to present, so I did a presentation on mouse vision, which I’ve been reading a lot about recently. I recorded the narration, and if you have Powerpoint, you…
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Connectomics in the retina
Connectomics and some of its promises made news last week when Sebastian Seung and Tony Movshon went head to head in a debate broadcast by Radiolab (archived here). I didn’t watch the webcast, but I wanted to point out a quite fascinating recent study by Briggman, Helmstaedter and Denk (2011) that shows some of the…
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Topography conquers all
The eye faithfully maps visual space to different positions on the retina. This retinotopy is preserved as the signal is forwarded from retinal ganglion cells to the LGN, then to V1, and onwards. Cells which are physically adjacent on a retinotopic map have receptive fields corresponding to similar positions in space. More generally, properties like…
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Big ideas: Focus on computation
Matteo Carandini has an editorial in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience arguing that we should focus energy on studying neural computation. In this context, neural computation is understood as an intermediate level of complexity between low-level neural circuits and high-level behavior. He argues that trying to go from physical descriptions of circuits to large-scale…
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Normalization as a canonical neural computation
There’s an excellent review on normalization in the January 2012 edition of Nature Reviews Neuroscience by Carandini and Heeger. The theory and mathematics of normalization have stayed consistent since the seminal papers Heeger (1992) and Carandini and Heeger (1994). The response of a given neuron is divided by the summed output of a normalization pool,…
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Spikes trigger LFP waves: the rebuttal
Nauhaus, Busse, Carandini and Dario Ringach published an influential paper in 2009 with pretty convincing evidence that spikes trigger traveling waves of activity visible in LFPs; that these waves travel laterally; and because the dynamics of these waves change during stimulation compared to spontaneous activity, that stimulation modulates functional connectivity. This could imply that a…
xcorr: AI & neuro 