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How the electrical potential in the brain influences the electrical
activity of single neurons. A tryptych of papers from our lab in
2010, spearheaded by Costas, two of them
published in The Journal of Neuroscience (joint work with Prof.
Gyorgy
Buzsaki) and one in Nature Neuroscience (joint work with
Prof. Henry
Markram) demonstrates the importance of electrical field effects
in the brain. Oscillatory spatiotemporal fluctuations of the electric
potential across fraction of a millimeter in neural tissue (typically
for the brain), induce small ephaptic (purely attributed to field
entrainment) potentials along neurons and help to synchronize spiking
of nearby cells. That is, unlike the situation in the heart, the
sounds of which is of use to the cardiologist but has no causal
efficiency for the body itself (it is an epiphenomenon), the local
field potential generated by the activity in the brain, feeds back
onto neurons themselves. Such coupling poses an alternative route of
neural communication and might be critical for cognitive operations.
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Machine vision demo.
On Sept. 26, 2007,
together with Rob Peters and
Laurent Itti from USC,
Sharat Chikkerur and
Tommy Poggio from MIT, and
Jonathan Harel from klab,
we tested our system for
saliency-based attentional selection, followed either by HMAX for object classification
or SIFT for object identification. Unlike the first time,
we tested our near real-time system outdoors on the streets of Pasadena, with an aim to
recognize objects such as cars, pedestrians, and buildings. Full videos of our results
are available here,
here, and
here. The
demonstration was a success.
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- At the 2007 Commencement
in early June at Caltech, under a glorious blue sky, members
of the laboratory graduated. Carl Gold, Farshad
Moradi and Kerstin
Preuschoff obtained their PhD in CNS; Will Coulter
obtained his MS in EE and Alex Huth obtained his BS
in CNS. We wish you good luck in your future careers and
stay in touch. Professor Koch brought Winie-the-Pooh along,
who recounted this conversation with Piglet.
Rabbit's clever, said
Pooh thoughtfully.
Yes, said Piglet, Rabbit's clever.
And he has Brain.
Yes, said Piglet, Rabbit has Brain.
There was a long silence.
I suppose, said Pooh, that's why he never understands anything.
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Real-time machine vision demo.
Together with Rob Peters and
Laurent Itti from USC,
Sharat Chikkerur and
Tommy Poggio from MIT, and
Jonathan Harel from klab,
we tested - for the first time - an integrated
attentional saliency selection, followed by either HMAX
object classification or by SIFT object identification.
That is, attention selects a portion of the image coming in
from a web-cam based on its saliency and passes this window
on to the two object recognition algorithms. We got the
complete system to work (although not quite at 60 fps yet).
Stay tuned for more.
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| - Klab Neurotics for Kelrof: Klab
participated with its own team (students, faculty and family
of klab) in Caltech's 24 hour relay running event KELROF on May,
5th/6th. The 10 runners completed 182x1600m (180 miles and
1660 yds).
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| - Given the relentless stream of requests for
comments on the relationship between quantum mechanics and
the brain, Christof Koch and Klaus Hepp wrote this essay for the March
30. 2006 issue of Nature.
| - The book by Shannon Moffett, The
Three-Pound Enigma, has just been published by
Algonquin Books. It describes on 40 pages the
research done in our laboratory.
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| - In February 2006, Caltech launched a brain
study program with a $8.9 Million gift from Eli Broad to
fund six Broad Fellows in
Brain Circuitry. These 6 Fellows and their
laboratories will be housed in the basement of Beckman
Behavioral Biology. Christof Koch is the director of the
program.
| - Friday, February 17. 2006, we celebrated our
K-Lab warming party.
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| - In November 2005 we moved from our old
lab---in the catacombs of Beckman Institute---to gorgeous
new and highly colored facilities on the 2. floor of the
Beckman Behavioral Biology building next door. We even have
windows (the transparent type, not mundane software)! In a
sense, we've returned to our roots, since the lab started
out (from 1986 until 1993) two floows below, in the basement
of BBB.
| - In the fall of 2005 the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London published a
paper, entitled What is
the Function of the Claustrum by Francis Crick and
Christof Koch. The function of this mysterious neuronal
structure, hidden beneath the inner surface of the
neocortex, occupied his thoughts in the last months of his
life. Indeed, he was dictating corrections to this
manuscript on July 28. 2004, the day he died. This is a
photograph taken by Kent Schnoeker of the Salk Institute of
Francis's table the next day, covered with drafts of the
claustrum manuscript and related papers.
| | | | - The Quest for
Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach", the book
that Prof. Christof Koch has been working on for three
years, was published in March of 2004. Based on the
conceptual work done with Francis Crick over the past ten
years (he wrote the book's forword), it presents a
neuroscientific approach to the problem of how consciousness
arises out of the brain.
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- "Extreme Science".
A cover story by Margaret Wertheim in the November 2003 issue of
LA Weekly.
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Over the past 12 years, we organized the annual,
three week long summer workshop on Neuromorphic
Engineering in Telluride, Colorado. The next one
will take place in July of 2008. For
active researchers interested in applying, check out
this
site.
To find out more about this emerging area of
engineering, read this newsletter.
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