Vacancy: The Brains of Computer Scientists needed!

The brain contains on average 86.1 billion neurons that, together in networks, make sure we eat, sleep, and can do our work. With this enormous number of neurons working together, neuroscientists need great computational power, and programming skills, to understand the brain. We talked with Dr. Aishwarya Parthasarathy about her PhD project at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she used her background in computer science to answer neuroscientific questions.

During her PhD project, Aishwarya tried to understand how the visual working memory is coded in the brain. She found that the same information in the working memory, but in different locations in our field of view, is encoded with deviant coding patterns in our brain. To come to this conclusion, Aishwarya taught a computer program to read out brain activity and translate it into the correct location in the field of view. ‘’You need to feed the computer program with a lot of data and tell it what these data mean. Then when it is trained, you can give it neuronal data, and it will tell you the most likely location of the field of view’’.

This computer program can then be used to investigate how the brain functions. During a visual memory task, the brain was recorded. During the task now, however, a distractor was shown. A change in the neural pattern was observed by the program after a visual distraction was shown, while the task was completed sufficiently. ‘’This means that neurons can morph their pattern of firing while keeping the visual working memory intact’’. This introduced the idea that neurons might be able to encode multiple types of information.

A mix of computational and experimental neuroscience is essential for understanding the brain.

86.1 billion neurons, and all of them encoding multiple types of information? This only emphasizes the need for more people like Aishwarya in the field of neuroscience. Already, clinical implications of this wonderful collaboration between Computer- and Neuroscience have stepped up to the marked: think about the widely used ‘brain-machine interface technology’ that decodes brain waves  into machine language, making it possible for paralyzed people to communicate. What more could the fusion of these two fields bring us? ‘’A mix of computational and experimental neuroscience is essential for understanding the brain’’, according to Aishwarya.