Jorge Mejías received his MSc in Physics and PhD in Computational neuroscience from the University of Granada. After working as a postdoc at the Centre for Neural Dynamics of the University of Ottawa (Canada) he is currently at the Center for Neural Science of New York University.
A review of the book: The brain electric: The dramatic high-tech rage to merge minds and machines by Malcolm Gay Flying cars, self-tying shoes or a fully functional hoverboard are only a few examples of the inventions which, according to the time-travel adventure sequel Back to the Future Part II, should be available for purchase […]
The idea that the brain might be in a critical state has been around for a while now. Ever since neuroscientists began wondering about where the noisy neural activity recorded in vivo came from, criticality has stood up as one of the main candidates to consider. But what is criticality? The term can be traced […]
Building machines which mimic the capacities of biological brains –and of the human brain in particular– is one of the main challenges of modern science. With the fast development of computer speed and power in the second half of the past century, this goal seemed, in the early days of artificial intelligence, simply a matter […]
The study of the spontaneous activity in the brain –and its origin– is one of the major puzzles in modern neural science. In many situations, the same neurons which behave smoothly and in an easily predictable way in in vitro experimental conditions, turn into unpredictable units, firing spikes irregularly and even chaotically, when they are […]
Competition, evidence suggests, is a constant in nature. Looking from the largest to the smallest structures that Mankind has been able to observe, one can easily find examples: in clusters of galaxies (in which sometimes galaxies compete with each other to pull in the matter from their outer regions), stars (like binary systems with planetary […]
For any animal, the real world is an ever-changing environment. Continuously, even then they are just remaining in a peaceful, awake state, animals receive multiple sensory signals encoding different features of their surroundings, or even carrying information about their own internal state (orientation, body movement, or internal temperature, for example). Some of these signals might […]
With the delicate economical situation that many developed countries are experiencing in the last years, a significant number of questions and concerns have been risen about how to properly assign and distribute funding to scientific institutions and research group leaders. In particular, a relevant question for science funding could be how to optimize the scientific […]
Our brain constitutes one of the finest pieces of natural machinery known, and it allows us to efficiently interact with our environment: searching for food, avoiding predators, communicating with other individuals, and even some more sophisticated stuff — like enjoying a well composed piece of classical (or rock) music. However, all this comes at a […]
A complex myriad of factors, many of them related with the global economic crisis, have given rise to a large number of social movements in the latest years. From the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring, or the more recent Turkish protests, most of these phenomena share a notorious fact: having the social networking and […]
For several decades now, physicists, mathematicians, neurobiologists and other specialists have been joining efforts to build realistic mathematical models of neurons. A typical model consists on one or several differential equations that are able to predict the evolution of the membrane potential of a neuron for a given input. When introduced in a computer, these […]