How the brain maps space

by Prof. Vijay Balasubramanian (Upenn & Oxford)

Thursday 20 Mar 2025, 15:15 → 16:15 Europe/Stockholm

Space is a concept that is fundamental to all branches of physics; it is also central to neuroscience. Indeed, animal life is defined by the ability to navigate in space. Humans think not only about physical space but also about abstract spaces that allow us to geometrize complex problems. Inside our heads, the brain represents space as a pattern of neural firing, produced and maintained by circuits in a group of brain regions called the "hippocampal formation." In this talk, I will describe progress towards a theory of organization of the circuits and systems that build the brain's internal description of space.  I will compare the predictions of theory to experimental data, and discuss how the brain self-organizes to produce a cognitive map: a way of imagining location in physical and abstract spaces.

About the Speaker: 

Vijay Balasubramanian received undergraduate degrees in Physics and Computer Science from MIT, a master's degree in Computer Science from MIT, and a PhD in Physics from Princeton University. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and then joined the Physics faculty at the University of Pennsylvania where he is now the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor.  He has held visiting positions at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris; Vrije Universiteit Brussels; and is an External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute.  In the 2024-2025 academic year he is the George Eastman Professor at the University of Oxford.  He has worked on problems across the full range of inquiry in theoretical physics, from the black hole information paradox to the biophysics of neural circuits.  He is broadly interested in how physical systems create, transform, and process information.