Applied Maths Seminar: Breakspear -- Wave-wave interactions and attractor dynamics on latent manifolds in the human brain

Prof Michael Breakspear (University of Newcastle) will be coming and giving a talk on
Wednesday 1 April at 12pm in Carslaw 451.  Afterwards, we will go to lunch.  

Title: Wave-wave interactions and attractor dynamics on latent manifolds in the human
brain 

Abstract: Converging evidence suggests that core functions of the human brain emerge
from travelling waves of neural activity traversing the cortex and hippocampus.  I first
present empirical evidence for the role of such waves during the encoding and retrieval
of our everyday perceptual experiences.  I then present a theoretical framework in which
wave-to-wave interactions between cortex and hippocampus are formalised as generalised
synchronisation between two manifolds of differing complexity — the high-dimensional
cortical surface and the lower-dimensional hippocampal latent manifold.  This
architecture is homologous to the dominant framework in text-to-image generative AI —
latent diffusion — but with two critical extensions: the hippocampal compression
occurs through generalized synchronization rather than by variational autoencoders, and
the dynamics are governed by dynamics in a multi-well attractor landscape rather than
first-order diffusion.  The result is a unified geometric theory of brain and
cognition.