The brain exhibits dynamical processes on different spatial and temporal scales. Single neurons have a size of tens of micrometers and fire during few milliseconds, whereas macroscopic brain activity, such as encephalographic data or the BOLD response in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, evolve on a millimeter or centimeter scale during tens of milliseconds. To understand the relation between the two dynamical scales, the mesoscopic scale of neural populations between these scales is helpful. Moreover, it has been found experimentally that neural populations encode and decode cognitive functions. The tutorial presents a specific type of rate-coding models which is both mathematically tractable and verifiable experimentally. It starts with a physiological motivation of the model, followed by mathematical analysis techniques for neural mass models in the presence of noise, and applications to general anaesthesia and cognitive functions.
Speakers:
09:00 - 10:30 : Introduction to Neural Fields (Axel Hutt)
10:45 - 12:15 : Nonlinear and Stochastic Analysis of Neural Fields Equations (Jeremie Lefebvre)
13:15 - 14:45 : Tutorial introduction to mean-field modelling of general anaesthesia (Alistair Steyn-Ross)
15:00 - 16:30 : Neural fields, a cognitive approach: attention, plasticity and decision (Nicolas Rougier)