UC Psychology Lecture Delves Into Understanding the Human Brain

The UC Department of Psychology’s Center for Cognition, Action and Perception is sponsoring the upcoming lecture, “Understanding the Human Brain: Complex Networks and Dynamics.”

The lecture, free and open to the public, will be held at 2 p.m., Friday, April 12, in Room 427 of Tangeman University Center (TUC).

The lecture features Olaf Sporns, one of the principal investigators on the

Human Connectome Project.

The project is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded consortium to map brain connectivity and its variability. The project has two major goals: to collect vast amounts of data using advanced brain imaging methods on a large population of healthy adults, and to make the data freely available so that scientists worldwide can make further discoveries about brain circuitry – opening avenues for vast new research in neuroscience.

Sporns is provost professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. His main research interest centers on the analysis and modeling of complex networks, particularly the structural and functional networks of the brain.

Sporns first suggested in 2005 that a full description of human brain connectivity, the "connectome," represents an indispensible foundation for cognitive neuroscience by allowing the mapping and modeling of how structural networks shape brain dynamics. He developed a widely used software package for network analysis, called the "Brain Connectivity Toolbox."

Sporns is the author of the book, “Networks of the Brain”, published by MIT Press. Sporns is developing data analysis and modeling tools for connectome data sets and contributing to the configuration and dissemination of data and software tools.

UC’s Center for Cognition, Action and Perception

promotes discovery in basic and applied cognitive science and related disciplines. The center represents an interdisciplinary network of researchers and collaborators from departments including psychology, philosophy, the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) and researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.  The center’s current research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.