April 2015 - Waterloo Brain Day

The 9th Annual Waterloo Brain Day

The brain is a horrendously complex and poorly understood system that poses both an immense challenge -- and possibly rich rewards -- to neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, and computer scientists. To celebrate Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, which integrates these approaches to the brain, and to highlight the already established Cognitive Science Program, we have invited four internationally renowned speakers to present generally accessible lectures from each of these perspectives.

Past brain day lecturers include Daniel Dennett, Daniel Schacter, Paul Glimcher, David van Essen, Patricia Churchland, William Bechtel, Geoff Hinton, Jack Gallant, Ned Block, Carl Craver, Terry Sejnowski, Keith Holyoak, Peter Strick, Jay McLelland, Tony Movshon, Jonathan Cohen, Larry Barsalou, Sebastien Seung, Mel Goodale, John Hopfield, Jesse Prinz, David Sheinberg, Gyorgy Buzsaki, Ian Gold, Michael Tarr, and Michael Hasselmo.

Date:
Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Location:
EV3-1408 (Environment 3 building, Room 1408)

Speakers:
Psychology - Thomas Griffiths (University of California, Berkeley)
Philosophy - Valerie G. Hardcastle (University of Cincinnati)
Neuroscience - Thilo Womelsdorf (York University)
Computation - Kenneth Miller (Columbia University)

Schedule:
8:30 a.m. - Refreshments EV3 Atrium
9:00 a.m. - Welcome
9:15-10:15 a.m. - Ken Miller, The Stabilized Supralinear Network: A Simple Circuit Motif Underlying Cortical Multi-input Integration (video)
10:15-10:45 a.m. - Coffee break
10:45-11:45 a.m. - Thilo Womelsdorf, Cells and Circuits Coordinating Attention: Dynamic Circuit Motifs in Primate Prefrontal Cortex (video)
12:00-1:30 p.m. - Lunch
1:30-2:30 p.m. - Tom Griffiths, Revealing Human Inductive Biases by Simulating Cultural Evolution (video)
2:30-3:00 p.m. - Coffee break
3:00-4:00 p.m. - Valerie Hardcastle, Radical Embodied Cognition, Projection, and the Problem of Consciousness (video)
4:15 p.m. - Reception (PAS 2464)

Sponsored by:
University of Waterloo Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN), Cognitive Science Program, and Faculty of Arts.