CAREER: From Imaging Collective Dynamics in the Cortex to Teaching Interdisciplinary Science

University Of Missouri-Saint Louis, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Synchronization in dynamical systems, particularly biological systems, is a relatively poorly understood phenomenon. Yet it is a problem of immense importance in problems ranging from animal flocking to neural synchronization in pathological states such as epilepsy. Since seizures are generally understood to result from the synchronization of large ensembles of periodically firing neurons, they can be considered as a problem of synchronized (nonlinear) oscillators. The essence of this project is to take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding synchronization in seizure development, combining imaging of seizure spread through the rat neocortex with computational simulations based in nonlinear-dynamical models of neural activity. Seizure spread will be imaged using the intrinsic optical signal, calcium-sensitive dyes, and voltage-sensitive dyes, making it possible to map the spread of brain activity with high spatial and temporal resolution, in order to determine the changes in synchronization of neural activity as a seizure develops, spreads, and dies away. These experimental studies will be complemented by computational models which will be used not only for comparison with experimental results, but also to investigate the dynamical mechanisms of seizure spread through the brain. Synchrony and loss of synchrony are important in many brain functions other than epilepsy, such as attention and perhaps even consciousness, as well as many other complex biological and physical systems. Thus the work undertaken in this CAREER activity will have a broad impact on general problems in the physics of complex systems. This award also supports an interdisciplinary outreach program within local St. Louis area high schools that provides students with an introduction to some of the most dramatic moments in the development of interdisciplinary science via active learning and via the life stories of the scientists whose work has helped to break down boundaries between fields. The PI also works with local teachers to develop means of expanding the outreach program by creating portable learning modules that teachers can use in their own classrooms. The program emphasizes how new ideas arise through unexpected connections between old ones. The program thus has the intellectual merit of being a study of the creative process itself, exploring this process both through the life stories of scientists of old, and through the awakening imaginative capabilities of the students themselves.