On February 24, 2016, Dr. Shyam Diwakar of Amrita School of Biotechnology‘s Computational Neuroscience and Neurophysiology Labs addressed students and faculty on how brain circuits function and how we study them as a multi-scale problem investigating neurons, circuits and behavior.

In a talk titled “Cerebellum, its physiology and motor control: What do rats tell us?”, Dr. Shyam introduced clinical recordings like EEG and fMRI as relevant methods to address circuit dysfunctions of the brain. The human brain is primed to act via fast and slow computations for processing several tasks. His gain point was on how the computational neuroscience lab uses data from experiments to model activity and how such models help predict functions of the brain and its disorders such as ataxia, autism and other neurological conditions. The focus of the research also centered on the cerebellum, or the little brain, a portion of the brain that works ten times faster than most other circuits. The talk also portrayed the fundamental issue of multiple single neuron recordings that are needed to understand complex brain activity and complex relationships with transmembrane currents via computational modeling, a study that has been ongoing at Amrita School of Biotechnology since 2009.

Dr. Shyam wore a 24 channel EEG headset recording his brain activity as he addressed the students. In his talk, he  indicated that the Compneuro lab is planning to study user behavior and the effects of yoga and meditation on stress, attention and behavior using EEG.