Ralph J. Greenspan to speak on Brain Activity Map at UC Riverside

University of California - RiversideMar 21 2013

Speaker Ralph J. Greenspan is the associate director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego

How the human brain, the most complex object in the known universe, does what it does remains a mystery. While it's true that scientists understand much about the composition of neurons (nerve cells) and how they send and receive electrical and chemical signals and how large bundles of neurons connect major areas of the brain to each other, a gap persists in our knowledge on how signals from individual neurons combine to produce activities such as walking, recognizing a melody, playing a musical instrument or understanding mathematics.

The "Brain Activity Map Project," a collaborative research initiative, aims at allowing scientists to fill in this gap by constructing a functional brain map designed to understand complex brain processes.

Ralph J. Greenspan, the associate director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at the University of California, San Diego, will give a talk on the Brain Activity Map (BAM) at 1:10 p.m., April 4, in the Genomics Building Auditorium on the University of California, Riverside campus.

The hour-long talk, titled "The Brain Activity Map," is free and open to the public. Parking on campus costs $6.

"This map will fill the gap in our knowledge of brain activity at a scale between single neuron and whole brain function, an intermediate level where theories predict that complex functions emerge from the network interactions involving millions of neurons," Greenspan said. "The BAM Project will be a large-scale, long-term research project built upon close interactions between scientists, engineers, and theoreticians."