Pauli Lectures 2008

Brains evolved to enhance survival and humans have more neurons than there are stars in our galaxy. Working together these neurons can see, hear, plan, and reach decisions that digital computers are unable to duplicate. Learning changes the properties of neurons and the way that they interact with each other. As we discover the basic principles of neural computation we beginning to build computing devices that also learn from experience.

The best understood part of our brain is the visual system. The patterns of light on the photoreceptors in the retina are first transformed into electrical signals and then analyzed into component features and their surrounding context in a hierarchy of visual processing areas. However, there is much more to vision than meets the eye and this lecture will conclude with a critique of pure vision.

The brain is not just a computing device: It is also a powerful communication network, with the total bandwidth of signaling between neurons comparable to that of the entire World Wide Web. How is all the traffic between brain areas regulated? How does the brain "google" itself? The answers to these questions are being sought in the temporal coherence of brain signals on a global scale. Curiously, brain states with the highest coherence are found during sleep.