Speakers

Program

Contact

Scientific Program: Hongbo Jia 贾宏博, jiahb@sibet.ac.cn ; Travel & Accommodation: Jialin Yang 杨家林,  jlyang@sjtu.edu.cn

Aim and Scope of the Workshop

The aim of the workshop is to establish an efficient communication channel between hard-core neuroscientists and hard-core physicists, via a ‘translator’ group consists of neuroscience researchers from physics or mathematics education background.
By doing so, we may eventually have a chance to tackle a question that is very simple-minded and yet extremely complicated to study: how does brain (mind) work? Due to the devastating biological complexity of the nervous system on the elementary cellular level, to date, there is no quantitative and systematic theory that is satisfactory and well accepted in the field. Most experimental findings in neuroscience are expressed by means of carefully using literal terms and statistical relations. Correspondingly, most theoretical works on modeling the brain largely rely on phenomenal interpretations of specifically selected experimental data and large amount of numerical simulations, but have limited analytic insight and little predictive power that is generalizable.
A circular reasoning is inevitable here, since the brains that work out the solution of such a question must also address how those brains work it out. Therefore we do not expect an ultimate solution. The best we can achieve in the near future that is expectable, is to pinpoint and work out a few simpler (i.e. well defined, in more complex manner) questions which are of high interest in the frontier of the biological neuroscience, that yet require to be addressed with the involvement of knowledge, skills and innovations in physics.
Thus, the neuroscientists and physicists need to talk with each other and understand the questions and techniques in each others’ field. The speakers of this workshop consists of a few hard-core neuroscientists, a few hard-core physicists, and a few interdisciplinary neuroscientists that have an education background in either physics or mathematics. The talks of all three types of speakers are intermingled in a one-day program, in order to maximize the amount of novel information exchange and stimulation to the brains of workshop participants. If this workshop would be continued and extended in the following years and decades, this rule of ‘salt-&-pepper distribution’ should be considerably kept.
The organizers sincerely welcome everyone who is interested in such a day of extraordinary brain adventure to join the workshop!