Next week we will resume our lunch seminars online, with a talk by Leon de Bruin. An abstract can be found at the bottom of this email. The meeting will take place on April 22^nd from 12.00 to 12.45. We will use Zoom, and you will receive an email invitation 5 to 10 minutes before we will start.

You can of course as usual have lunch during the seminar, but don’t forget to mute yourself if you do 🙂

Finally, these seminars might not take place as regularly as they used to in pre-Corona times, though we will do our best!

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Abstract

The mechanistic explanatory strategy has had considerable success in various neuroscientific subdisciplines, including molecular, cognitive and computational neuroscience. Systems neuroscience, however, with its focus on the study of networks at various levels of brain organization, has proven to be a challenge. It is commonly accepted that mechanistic explanation involves structural and functional decomposition  – breaking down a system into concrete parts and activities in order to identify the causal relationships that realize the phenomenon. But systems neuroscientists seem to abstract away from concrete parts and activities and instead focus on general properties of neural networks, such as robustness and functional redundancy. Indeed, it has been suggested that systems neuroscientists provide topological explanations, which aim to explain how a system can resist or react to various perturbations.

In my talk I will take a closer look at the distinction between mechanistic and topological explanation and show that in contemporary research in systems neuroscience they actually go hand in hand.