# The Maps Inside your Head

- Institution: CERN
- Department: CERN Colloquium
- Speaker: Vijay Balasubramanian
- Year: 2018
- Language: English
- Source: [CERN](https://videos.cern.ch/record/3004237)
- Licence: [CERN](http://copyright.web.cern.ch)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (sources give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the source's own words)

How do our brains make sense of a complex and unpredictable world? In this talk, I will discuss a physicist's approach to the neural topography of information processing in the brain. First I will review the brain's architecture, and how neural circuits map out the sensory and cognitive worlds. Then I will describe how highly complex sensory and cognitive tasks are carried out by the cooperative action of many specialized neurons and circuits, each of which has a simple function. I will illustrate my remarks with one sensory example and one cognitive example. For the sensory examples, I will consider the sense of smell ("olfaction"), whereby humans and other animals distinguish vast arrays of odor mixtures using very limited neural resources. For the cognitive example, I will consider the "sense of place", that is, how animals mentally represent their physical location. Both examples demonstrate that brains have evolved neural circuits that exploit sophisticated principles of mathematics - principles that scientists have only recently discovered. .

0:00:00 Slide 1

0:02:14 Slide 2

0:03:01 Slide 3

0:03:18 Slide 4

0:06:27 Slide 5

0:08:30 Slide 6

0:09:30 Slide 7

0:11:13 Slide 8

0:13:29 Slide 9

0:14:02 Slide 10

0:16:07 Slide 11

0:16:31 Slide 12

0:18:47 Slide 13

0:19:20 Slide 14

0:20:38 Slide 15

0:20:46 Slide 16

0:22:43 Slide 17

0:25:57 Slide 18

0:26:30 Slide 19

0:27:37 Slide 20

0:28:45 Slide 21

0:29:12 Slide 22

0:30:37 Slide 23

0:33:59 Slide 24

0:34:46 Slide 25

0:35:06 Slide 26

0:36:09 Slide 27

0:36:42 Slide 28

0:37:42 Slide 29

0:38:02 Slide 30

0:38:36 Slide 31

0:39:42 Slide 32

0:40:39 Slide 33

0:42:49 Slide 34

0:44:07 Slide 35

0:45:24 Slide 36

0:46:28 Slide 37

0:46:58 Slide 38

0:47:23 Slide 39

0:47:34 Slide 40

0:48:21 Slide 41

0:48:52 Slide 42

0:49:23 Slide 43

0:50:05 Slide 44

0:51:24 Slide 45

0:52:03 Slide 46

0:52:55 Slide 47

0:53:25 Slide 48

0:55:02 Slide 49

0:56:12 Slide 50

0:57:16 Slide 51

0:57:25 Slide 52…

## Lectures

1. [The Maps Inside your Head](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/cern/3004237/6d80f03d3aaa), 1 h 29 min (CERN's player)