"Information, Bits, Coding, and the Brain"
featuring Dr. Jonathan Pillow

On April 13th, 2013, Dr. Jonathan Pillow led the Saturday Morning Math Group in a discussion on encoding and the brain. Students started by digging into ideas about how our neurons encode information about the world around us, and looked at different optical illusions to se how the way that this encoding happens affects our perceptions. Dr. Pillow discussed how math is crucial tool in understanding how this encoding and decoding happens, and then introduced ideas from probability and information theory that are useful in these kinds of problems. Students worked with different probability distributions to quantify the uncertainty involved in different random variables, and then used these ideas in come up with codes that could convey information in an efficient way.

Printable version of the flyer

Videos from the talk: Jonathan Pillow, April 13th, 2013

Here are some pictures from the talk. Right click and select 'view image' to see it larger.