Mastodawn

Tom Hartley May 11, 2023

Word cloud based on the transcript of the course.

Tom Hartley May 11, 2023

I guess the course still has a few rough edges and perhaps some oversimplification. Maybe my style can be a bit wordy in places, but I think it's worth a watch if you'd like to understand how the brain represents and processes information.

Here's the youtube playlist again: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkshnhH9Ap3iEy-oRxUFROiykUCWdsZLw

The unofficial title is "Apple Banana Cognition" and it is intended to be an A,B,C of neural representation.

Apple Banana Cognition: Principles of Neural Representation

YouTube

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Tom Hartley May 11, 2023

In 2021 we had to do the whole thing on video due to pandemic closures. It was a lot of work, but it encouraged me to smooth out some of the rougher edges, and editing means that the content can be clearer and denser than possible in a live situation.

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Tom Hartley May 11, 2023

I am quite proud of the course, because I think it tells a coherent story in an accessible way. It doesn't hinge on a lot of background knowledge (it's aimed at second year psychology undergrads, but I think it could work for a variety of audiences).

Tom Hartley May 11, 2023

I just finished teaching my short (four week) course on Principles of Neural Representation. It'll be the last time for the foreseeable future as our programme is being restructured. Here are the videos from 2021 when we could not lecture in person...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkshnhH9Ap3iEy-oRxUFROiykUCWdsZLw

Apple Banana Cognition: Principles of Neural Representation

YouTube

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Tom Hartley Apr 21, 2023

... 2. Focusing on the human ancestral line (read this in context, they look at 90 species to get to this point, and they aren't thinking of human evolution as an inevitable linear progression).

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Tom Hartley Apr 21, 2023

Here are a couple of other nice figures I saw this week (from the intriguing Schwarz et al., Nat Comms, 2023: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37574-x). How the mammalian cortex may have evolved under different ecological pressures. 1. By ecological niche ...

Evolution of cortical geometry and its link to function, behaviour and ecology - Nature Communications

The cerebral cortex shows many similarities among species, whilst also enabling adaptations to a range of specific niches. By building a unified cerebral cortex map of ninety species, this study traces the intricate evolutionary history that links cortical morphology and its functional topography.

Nature

Tom Hartley Apr 21, 2023

Nice figure and caption from Buzsaki & Tingley Annual Rev. Neurosci, 2023.

Tom Hartley Apr 14, 2023

This looks good. Visualize and search map of the entire Pubmed database (a huge chunk of the world's scientific literature) https://static.nomic.ai/pubmed.html

The landscape of biomedical research

Tom Hartley Mar 13, 2023

Iris van Rooij 💭Mar 9, 2023

Universities have a hard time accepting women who speak truth to power.

This is the essay that led her university to wanting to fire Susanne Täuber. I recommend reading it https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.12516