Are We Weaving Our Way Into a Tighter Constraint of Possibilities?

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Eve discusses many of the lessons she has learned studying a small nervous system, the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system (STG). The STG has only about 30 neurons and its connections and neurophysiology are well-understood. Yet Eve's work has shown it functions under a remarkable diversity of conditions, and does so is a remarkable variety of ways. We discuss her work on the STG specifically, and what her work implies about trying to study much larger nervous systems, like our human brains.

• The Marder Lab.
• Twitter: @MarderLab.
• Related to our conversation:
  • Understanding Brains: Details, Intuition, and Big Data.
  • Emerging principles governing the operation of neural networks (Eve mentions this regarding "building blocks" of neural networks).

0:00 - Intro 3:58 - Background 8:00 - Levels of ambiguity 9:47 - Stomatogastric nervous system 17:13 - Structure vs. function 26:08 - Role of theory 34:56 - Technology vs. understanding 38:25 - Higher cognitive function 44:35 - Adaptability, resilience, evolution 50:23 - Climate change 56:11 - Deep learning 57:12 - Dynamical systems