John White

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  Dynamic-clamp studies of neuronal synchronization
  John White
  Coherent neuronal activity is ubiquitous and presumably important in brain function. I will review my group's experimental studies of the mechanisms underlying coherent activity using dynamic clamp technology, which allows us to perform virtual-reality-inspired experiments in neurons in vitro. Using these techniques and mathematical tools from dynamical systems theory, we are trying to understand which factors give rise to stable neuronal synchronization in the presence of heterogeneity, noise, and conduction delays.
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  Noise in the Nervous System
  John White
  One of the principal tasks of the nervous system is to generate internal representations of the world, in order that we might best interpret the present, predict the future, and thus pass our genes to the next generation. For this reason, it seems quite surprising that the nervous system is so noisy. This noise is reasonably well characterized at the level of ion channels and individual cells, but it is not clear why such a level of noise is tolerated. In this talk, I will describe some of the major sources of noise in the nervous system, and will discuss some of the current puzzles regarding how the effects of noise scale in the large-N limit.
• 
  Noise in the Nervous System
  John White
  One of the principal tasks of the nervous system is to generate internal representations of the world, in order that we might best interpret the present, predict the future, and thus pass our genes to the next generation. For this reason, it seems quite surprising that the nervous system is so noisy. This noise is reasonably well characterized at the level of ion channels and individual cells, but it is not clear why such a level of noise is tolerated. In this talk, I will describe some of the major sources of noise in the nervous system, and will discuss some of the current puzzles regarding how the effects of noise scale in the large-N limit.