A few of my talks — and those of students in my group — are archived on video. Most were recorded in July 2014 at a workshop of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences at the University of Toronto.
Science can be entertaining, and a good workshop talk is one of the rare places where the mathematics of the brain gets to be told as a story. Below are recordings that are still online. They centre on one theme: cortical spreading depression — the slow wave of near-complete depolarisation that sweeps across the cortex and that we believe underlies the migraine aura — and how the tools of nonlinear dynamics let us describe it.
Fields Institute workshop, Toronto (July 2014)
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Ghost behavior: transient localized patterns of cortical spreading depression in the gyrencephalic human cortex — my own talk, on why spreading depression in the folded human cortex behaves so differently from the textbook waves seen in smooth animal cortex. Watch on the Fields video archive ↗
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Dynamics from seconds to hours in a Hodgkin–Huxley model with time-dependent ion concentrations and buffer reservoirs — Niklas Hübel (PhD student), on stretching the classic Hodgkin–Huxley framework across the enormous range of timescales that ion homeostasis actually spans. Watch on the Fields video archive ↗
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Nucleation, and front and pulse propagation — Frederike Kneer (PhD student), on how a wave gets started in an excitable medium and what determines whether it survives. Watch on the Fields video archive ↗
The full programme, with all talks in the workshop, is in the Fields event archive ↗.
Slides
- Localized transient waves of cortical spreading depression in migraine — a slide deck covering much of the same material. View on SlideShare ↗
If you would rather read than watch, the same ideas run through Physics to treat migraines and Statistische Physik und das Gehirn.