The videos from Brain Day 2023 are now available on line at our youtube channel. Hope you enjoy.
Noah Cowan
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
Stabilizing the Unstable Brain
The nervous system may be the most sophisticated control system in the
known universe, riding at the helm of an equally sophisticated plant. Understanding how the nervous system encodes and processes sensory
information, and then computes motor action, therefore, involves understanding a closed loop. However it is often necessary to "isolate"
all or part of the nervous system to study it. But there is no guarantee
that the brain is "open-‐loop stable" and in fact there is good reason to
believe that it is not. Here we discuss two problems in which we first close
a feedback loop around the brain, and then take steps to perform system
identification of the stabilized brain in order to understand its computations.
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