Unraveling the Neural Code

Presentation by Marlene Behrmann, the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University.

Marlene Behrmann’s research is concerned with the psychological and neural bases of visual processing, with particular focus on the mechanisms by which the signals from the eye are transformed into meaningful and coherent percepts by the brain. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach using a combination of computational, neuropsychological and functional brain imaging studies with normal and brain-damaged individuals, as well as with individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Carnegie Mellon’s BrainHub research initiative builds on the university’s strengths in biology, computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering to study on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and develops new technologies that stand to transform neuroscience.

[Jeff-Russ]

All the academic literature I see published in the years since this video show researchers were still debating even the fundamental method by which the brain encodes information within the spike trains of neurons firing i.e. the debates between theories of rate coding vs spike timing. So I would think being able to decode something as complex and specific as the image of a face from neuron's firing would be many years from now. I am a computer programmer so I'm naturally curious about the details about neural encoding. But I can only find vague information and debates about fundamentals.