Cognitive Regime Shift II - When/why/how the Brain Breaks/RandyMcIntosh

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Notes by user Randy McIntosh (University of Toronto) for Cognitive Regime Shift II - When/why/how the Brain Breaks

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

• Presentation highlights
• Open questions that came up
• How your perspective changed
• Impact on your own work
• e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

The take home message for me was that the principles of how the brain is designed that makes it unique and similar to other complex systems. Some the terminology/features in complex systems can, and should, be applied to the brain, but how these features are realized may be unique to the brain. There are many methods used in empirical neuroscience that can provide a springboard to this, such as graph theory metrics, coherence measures, etc, but these should be conceived in the complex systems framework to how they support features like robustness, criticality, and cascading failures.

The challenge will be to establish the common dialogue to build this bridge and the technological foundation to support it (e.g., modeling platforms for deep learning, dynamical systems that can take the empirical data as direct constraints).

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Reference material notes

Some examples:

• Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
• Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
• This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
• Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).
• McIntosh & Jirsa 2019 present a dynamical systems framework - Structured Flows on Manifolds - that posits that neural processes are flows depicting system interactions that occur on relatively low-dimension manifolds, which constrain possible functional configurations. Such constraints allow us to characterize the actual and potential configurations of brain networks and provide a new perspective wherein behavior deficits from pathological processes could be either the emergence of an existing repertoire or the adaptation of the system to damage.
• Corbetta et al 2018 propose that large-scale nerwork abnormalities following a stroke reduce the variety of neural states visited during task processing and at rest, resulting in a limited repertoire of behavioral states. The emphasis here is on the changes in the dimensionality of brain and behavior dynamics and whether explicitly linking the two would provide a better characterization of the deficits and adaptation following stroke.

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Reference Materials

Title	Author name	Source name	Year	Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days.	Page views	Related file
The Hidden Repertoire of Brain Dynamics and Dysfunction	Anthony R. McIntosh, Viktor K. Jirsa	bioRxiv	2019	0	7	Download
On the low dimensionality of behavioral deficits and alterations of brain network connectivity after focal injury	MaurizioCorbetta, Joshua S. Siegel, Gordon L. Shulman	Cortex	2018	0	6	Download (Encrypted)

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