Today’s guest has argued that the present dominant way of doing systems neuroscience in mammals (large-scale electric or optical recordings of neural activity combined with data analysis) will be inadequate for understanding how their brain works.
Instead, he proposes to focus on the simple roundworm C.elegans with only 302 neurons and try to reverse engineer it by means of optical stimulation and recordings, and modern machine-learning techniques.
Links to papers mentioned in the podcast:
- Haspel et al: “To reverse engineer an entire nervous system”, arXiv, 2023
- Jonas and Kording: “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?”, PLoS Computational Biology, 2017
- Lazebnik “Can a biologist fix a radio?”, Cancer Cell, 2002
The podcast was recorded on February 5th, 2024 and lasts 1 hour and 34 minutes.
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