Cracking the Neural Code: Discovering the Language of the Brain

Neuroscientists are rapidly converging on answers to once seemingly intractable questions: How do we learn? How are memories stored? How is information represented across ensembles of cells? How do neural circuits compute? This talk by LANL researcher Garrett Kenyon will survey recent progress in experimental and theoretical brain science, including contributions from local researchers, and present some novel hypotheses as to how biological information processing differs fundamentally from conventional digital computation.

Garrett Kenyon is exploring this field in his work at Los Alamos National Laboratories. His research is expanding rapidly thanks to the new Roadrunner supercomputer at LANL, where he is part of the PetaVision Synthetic Cognition project. Along with other team members, Garrett is using the extreme power of this computer to mimic complex neurological complexes in an effort to develop a Rosetta Stone for the language of the brain.

The term PetaVision refers to the scale of computation required to model neurological activity. The term ‘peta’ means a million billion and, in computer terms, it refers to a machine that can perform a million billion operations a second. Roadrunner’s 1.105 petaflops/second ranks it number one in the world’s supercomputers. (It’s also ranked number seven in terms of energy efficiency on the Green500 list.) The PetaVision team was chosen to be one of the first projects to run on Roadrunner, using the machine to mimic the activity of more than one billion visual neurons as the perform the routine human task of seeing and recognizing objects.

Garrett will discuss this work and his other efforts to decode the language of the brain on Tuesday, July 21st as part of the q-bios series of public lectures at the Complex. More information about the q-bio series is available here. There will be no August lecture as the q-bio Summer School and Conference is scheduled that month.