Simplifying the Brain: A vision for Neuroscience in India

Speaker Info:
V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy is a professor in the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras. He obtained his BTech from IIT Madras, MS/PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His received postdoctoral training in the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. The Computational Neuroscience Lab (CNS Lab) that he heads works on developing models of the basal ganglia, spatial navigation, stroke rehabilitation and neurovascular coupling. He is the author of two books in neuroscience. He is the inventor of a novel script called Bharati, a unified script for Indian languages.

Topic of Discussion:
In this talk, the speaker highlights certain lacunae in current brain theories/models which are often of “curve fitting” type. Neuroscience models often lack the depth and universality of the type found in fundamental physical theories. In experimental domains, currently there is movement to generate mountains of brain data without making a commensurate effort to develop deep unifying brain theories. As a demonstration of how it is possible to develop simple brain theories/models that can explain diverse functions of brain systems, the speaker outlines his lab’s (CNS Lab) decade-long work in a brain system called the Basal Ganglia, a part of the brain associated with Parkinson’s disease. Next the speaker describes the CNS lab’s work on spatial navigation functions of another brain system called the hippocampus. Discovery of the “spatial cells” of the hippocampus was awarded the Nobel prize in 2014. The CNS lab had developed a simple model that can explain a wide variety of phenomena related to spatial navigation in 2d (in rats and mice) and in 3D (in bats). Taking the above work to its logical consummation, the speaker outlines his lab’s plans to build a reduced model of the whole brain called the MESOBRAIN. The MESOBRAIN, once realized in software and hardware, is expected to have immense applications in medicine and engineering.