Research Goals
Synchrony in Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
The primary goals of the Summer Institute was to develop the case for the neural synchrony view of primary awareness and to identify key areas for future research to either confirm or disconfirm its usefulness as a theory of consciousness. Secondary goals were to begin to relate this hypothesis to the wider problems involved in understanding human consciousness, such as the relation of primary conscious awareness to secondary forms of awareness such as self- and meta-consciousness, how it advances (or not) the quest to understand why there should be experience at all (the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness), and the role of culture in generating unique forms of human consciousness.
Synchronous Rhythms in the Brain
The brain is the main source of biological rhythms. These rhythms range from sleep-wake cycles and life-supporting respiration rhythm to hormonal rhythms that control reproduction and from gaits in animal locomotion to the highly sophisticated rhythms displayed in piano playing and belly-dancing. Synchronization plays a key role in the networks of neurons that generate these rhythms.
This small symposium aims to gather the leading experts in a variety of research fields related to synchronization together to exchange ideas on the topic. These include experimentalists, mathematicians, and theoreticians, from the following areas: horomonal rhythms generated by synchronized endocrine neurons; the origin of respiratory rhythms; synchrony and epileptic seizure-like activities; general theory of synchrony in neural networks and dynamic systems; mathematics and simulation of physiologically realistic neural networks; measurement and interpretation of neural synchrony in humans.
Invited Speakers: Olivier Bertrand, Christoph Borgers, Kevin Catt, Bard Ermentrout, Jack L. Feldman, Yoshikazu Isomura, Eugene Izhikevich, Leslie Kay, Nancy Kopell, Sue Moenter, Urs Ribary, Horacio Rotstein, Ilya A. Rybak, Bill Troy, Martin Wechselberger.
This workshop is jointly sponspored by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS).