14.05: Understanding the brain in theory and practice with Florencia Iacaruso

[Marcus Ghosh]

Hello, 

We are hosting a series of workshops on building better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience! 

Our third workshop will be 14.05 at Imperial White City, from 16:00 onwards. 

There will be a talk from Florencia Iacaruso (title and abstract below), followed by a discussion and time for networking (with food). 

Registration is free, but required (details here). 

The dynamic brain: How experience reshapes multisensory interactions in cortical circuits

How do different brain regions communicate to make sense of the world? The visual and auditory cortices are tightly interconnected, allowing information from one sense to influence processing in another. While the structure of local cortical connections is increasingly well understood, the rules that govern how information is exchanged across cortical areas, and how this communication changes with experience, remain largely unknown. In this talk, I will first examine the principles underlying communication between the visual and auditory cortex. I will then show how passive, unsupervised experience reshapes these interactions during the processing of naturalistic audiovisual scenes. Using longitudinal recordings of neural activity, we find that repeated exposure does not stabilise sensory representations. Instead, both local circuits and long-range inputs exhibit representational drift, revealing that unsupervised experience systematically reorganises cortical communication. In particular, cross-modal inputs become more informative when the primary sensory modality is weak or absent, suggesting that the brain optimises representations to compensate for missing information. Finally, I will discuss how attention-based neural network models provide a useful framework for analysing complex neuronal population data, and how their predictive power may stem from structural similarities with cortical circuit organisation. I will use this work as a case study to highlight how close interactions between experimental and theoretical approaches can deepen our understanding of brain function while inspiring new, biologically grounded computational tools, and to open discussion on fostering stronger collaborations between these fields.

Our upcoming workshops include: 

• Crick / June 25^th – Megan Peters (UCL)
• Imperial-X / July 16^th – Sadra Sadeh (KCL)
• Crick / September 10^th – Dan Goodman (Imperial)

See you then, 

Marcus Ghosh