Dr. Davidsen will deliver a Mind in Vitro seminar on September 18, 2026 at 4:15pm in 4100 Sidney Lu Mechanical Engineering Building.
Abstract: Humans and animals constantly transform sensory inputs into actions, but it is still unclear how this mapping from neural activity to behavior is implemented in a real nervous system. Understanding the principles and mechanisms underlying complex brain function and cognition – including how neural processing generates or encodes behavior – is indeed one of the major challenges of our time. In this talk, I will give an overview of our recent advances to tackle this challenge through in vitro and in vivo experiments and mathematical model studies along two main lines of inquiry: The critical brain hypothesis has been proposed as a theoretical framework with which to study multi-scale neuronal dynamics and interprets scale-free statistics of coordinated neuronal activity as a universal operating mechanism across spatio-temporal scales. Flexibility in (partial) synchronisation, a phenomenon whereby neural assemblies – neurons on the smaller scale and brain regions on the larger scale – activate coherently in time is believed to be crucial for overall cognitive performance, with patterns of increased synchronization indicating enhanced cognitive integration, while decreased synchronization is indicative of cognitive segregation. Our work shows that in some cases criticality and synchronization might be naturally coupled.
Biography: Dr. Davidsen is a Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Calgary, working in the field of Complexity Science. He is a 2025 Killam Annual Professor, the recipient of a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) and holds a visiting Research Professorship at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (Germany). In 2015 and again in 2017, he was elected Secretary of the Nonlinear Geophysics Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union. At the University of Calgary, he leads both the Complexity Science Group – the first transdisciplinary research group in Canada – and since its inception in 2019, the Computational Neuroscience Platform. This transdisciplinary, cross-cutting platform provides critical expertise to improve our understanding of the principles that govern brain development, structure, physiology, and cognition, focusing on the areas of brain circuits, machine learning in neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and quantum neuroscience. Dr. Davidsen’s research in the transdisciplinary field of Complexity Science has applications ranging from neurosciences to earthquakes with several important practical and theoretical contributions in his research spanning multiple disciplines, from physics and geophysics to biochemistry and neuroscience, and even social sciences and family law.