Learning & the aging brain

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Concept

Tutorial meeting: Sunday 4pm in the lecture room. Bring a laptop if you've got one - download & install JavaNNS.
Next group meeting: Tentatively scheduled for the evening of Wednesday, June 20

We can mimic the effect of aging on the human brain by deliberately corrupting neural network models of human learning (e.g. random deletion of nodes/synapses).

Possible directions include: exploring compensatory mechanisms for neuronal loss (related to self-healing networks?), modeling specific age-related diseases - e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's (chaos & tremors?).

Please feel free to add questions, theories, suggestions.

Who's interested

• Kristen Fortney
• Gregor Obernosterer
• Amitabh Trehan
• Vikas Shah
• Biljana Petreska
• Amelie Veron
• Saleha Habibullah
• Yossi Yovel
• jd
• Natasha Qaisar
• Mike Wojnowicz

Questions to answer

What sorts of age defects should be incorporated into the network?

What type of neural net should be used as a model? (backprop/attractor/etc)

Background reading

Modeling brain disease

Integrative neurocomputational perspectives on cognitive aging, neuromodulation, and representation. - Li and Sikstrom http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Sverker.Sikstrom/NBR-Li-Sikstrom.pdf

Neuroengineering models of brain disease. - Finkel
http://www.mssm.edu/cnic/pdfs/FinkelNeuroengineering.pdf

Patterns of functional damage in neural network models of associative memory
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~ruppin/spat.pdf

Small worlds & the brain

Scale-Free Brain Functional Networks (Physical Review Letters, PRL 94, 018102, 2005)
Comments: Evidence that brain functionally behaves as a small-world network with scale-invariant properties
I will hand this out at the 6/17 meeting. (Mike)

Faster learning in small-world neural networks - Kroger, arXiv 2005
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0402076
Comments: Only small-worlds + backprop paper. Read this!!

Extremely high stability to perturbations in small-world networks - Albert, Jeong, & Barabasi, 2000
(Nature, 406, 378-381)
Comments: This finding treads dangerously close to ours! (Mike)

The meaning of mammalian adult neurogenesis and the function of newly added neurons: the "small-world" network - Manev, Medical Hypotheses 2005
Comments: Kind of half-baked, but good for references & overview

Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks - Duncan Watts & Steven Strogatz
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v393/n6684/abs/393440a0.html
Please contact me (Gregor) for print version in case you don't have access to Nature

Possibly related

What is physiologic complexity and how does it change with aging and disease? - Goldberger, Peng, Lipsitz http://reylab.bidmc.harvard.edu/heartsongs/neurobiology-of-aging-2002-v23-23.pdf

Exploratory committees

General note: all should look at best neural network approach to their problem

• Demyelination: Biljana & Yossi
  • Process to model these systems, time-delay in neural networks
  • Biology of MS
• Normal aging: Kristen & Vikas & Amitabh
  • Biological underpinning, general patterns of damage
• Parkinson's disease: jd & Kristen
• Alzheimer's disease: Gregor & Natasha & Vikas
• Boolean networks and self-healing: Amelie & Amitabh (connected with the Healing strategies for networks project)
• Social implications of aging: Saleha & Amelie

Tutorials

• General neural networks: Biljana
• Attractor neural networks: Kristen & Vikas
• Boolean networks: Amelie & Amitabh
• Biological basis diseases (once chosen)