Hi everyone, I’d like to choose topology in neuroscience as my final project. This is a wonderful topic. Scientists focus on not only biological connections, but also functional connections. Because of the complexity of brains and non-stationary signal, it’s hard to find some stable features to define an activity. Then topology becomes a good method to give a description on brains’ activities.
February 17, 2018
My project in neuroscience
5 Comments
sroheda
February 19, 2018 — 21:22
This is a really challenging project. It’ll be interesting to see if there are any inherent symmetries in the connections between the neural nodes in the brain, and also how connected they are. I am also intrigued by how you would use topology to represent brain’s activities and extract corresponding features. Looking forward to what you find.
hduan2
February 19, 2018 — 19:22
This topic sounds cool. As a physics graduate student, I am looking forward to knowing how to build a topological model of neuroscience. I always think neuroscience is an experimental science. A topological application of neuroscience definitely open a new gate for me.
caroyse
February 19, 2018 — 17:50
This sounds awesome. Did you see the “Nerves and Neurons” section in the second chapter of Ghrist’s Elementary Applied Topology book? I was geekin over the idea of neural computation with topological structures.
afranci2
February 19, 2018 — 10:48
I think this a very interesting topic not only from its applicational perspective but also to see how the stuff that we studied in class is going to be applied here. I guess you might be using simplicial complexes to model the neural connections and trying to see what all topological invariants are there and does these invariants.are associated with a particular function of the brain or some other global property. But since the brain a lot of functions, this may correspond to a lot of topological invariants. It will be interesting to see what are all those invariants in higher dimensional complexes and so on.
Or I might not have got the problem in the right direction. Then its more interesting for me to see how topological tools are applied here.
aliman
February 19, 2018 — 10:00
This sounds fascinating! I watched a youtube video a while ago about connectome (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opqIa5Jiwuw) which I thought was very intriguing. I had not been exposed to the idea of topology at the time of watching the video, but thinking about it now, it’d be really interesting to see how the topological structure of the brain affects the connections between each part of the brain, as well as the firing patterns of neurons, which we know are integral parts of human’s emotions and other brain functions.