Blogging the Noosphere

Day 5

Wolf Singer gave a wonderful plenary talk this morning entitled “Oscillations, Synchrony and Temporal Codes in Cortical Processing”. Among many good experiments and ideas, I’ll just pick out one.

One of Singer’s main points is that the current debate about the importance of rate coding vs. temporal coding hypothesis in brain neurodynamics is misplaced. Singer argues that both are in fact used, and important. Can’t help but point out a connection with the current book I am reading, Scott Kelso’s The Complementary Nature. In general, Kelso says that many of these controversies and viewpoints, such as Nature~Nurture, Wave~Particle, Time~Space, are really complementary pairs. Viewpoints that stress one as more important than the other almost always turn out to be fundamentally wrong. Deep scientific advancements are often in fact the results of a synthesis (or even a Kuhnian type paradigm shift) that incorporates both seemingly dichotomous forces, and reconciles the seeming incompatibilities.

So back to Singer’s points about Rate Coding ~ Temporal Coding views, I wonder if there are any neurodynamical models that seek to reconcile and represent both in the same model. Most work I am familiar with use either a model like a spiking neuron model, that will necessarily emphasize temporal coding, or maybe a population model, like the K-sets, that focus in on rate representations.

Here are a couple of pictures of myself from the opening conference welcome:

Shulan arrived here in Orlando today. We’re planning on spending Saturday at Disney World, for a brief fun weekend getaway. I’m very excited and really looking forward to going! Its quite a contrast, the type of intense concentration of a conference for the week, then going to an amusement park. Kinda the opposite ends of the spectrum of experience. I guess that is why conferences are often held in such places (or at least the excuses we tell ourselves on why such conferences should be held in such places :-). Anyway I’ll definitely have to post some pictures from our Disney adventure this Saturday.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS