Fall 2016
Seminars are held at 11:30AM in Cullimore Hall, Room 611, unless noted otherwise. For questions about the seminar schedule, please contact Casey Diekman.
Date: September 13, 2016
Speaker: Oreste Piro
University of the Balearic Islands,
Title: "Can Dynamical Criticality Lead to Statistical Criticality?: An Affirmative Answer from a Model of Neural Tissue"
Abstract:
It is widely recognized that balancing excitation and inhibition is important in the nervous system. When such a balance is sought by global strategies, few modes remain poised close to instability, and all other modes are strongly stable. In this talk we present a simple abstract model in which this balance is sought locally by units following "anti-Hebbian" evolution: all degrees of freedom achieve a close balance of excitation and inhibition and become “critical" in the dynamical sense. At long time scales, a complex "breakout" dynamics follows in which different modes of the system oscillate between prominence and extinction; the model develops various long-tailed statistical behaviors and may become self-organized critical.