The Institute of Neuroscience and Neurotechnology hosted a conversation with Dr. Viktor Jirsa, facilitated by professor of biomedical, physiology, and kinesiology, Dr. Stephen Robinovitch. Jirsa is director of the neuroscience institute in Marseille and a theoretical physicist. Currently, Jirsa is involved as the lead scientist in both the Human Brain Project and The Virtual Brain.
Robinovitch started the dialogue by asking about the significance of The Virtual Brain for both basic science and medical perspectives. The Virtual Brain model is a project that Jirsa has worked on for the past 20 years. “This model is an open source software package for exploring network mechanisms of brain function in health and disease,” explained Robinovitch.
Robinovitch noted Jirsa’s work is referred to as data augmentation. He asked Jirsa how his work can be considered in contexts such as epilepsy. Jirsa answered this question by explaining the specific use for clinicians and research.
“One particularity of the virtual brain is that it is not just a simulating source activity. But it’s also mapping the sources,” said Jirsa. Further noting in terms of medicine, the situation of a patient’s illness will vary from patient to patient. The Virtual Brain will be able to tailor healthcare decisions for each patient, based on the data derived from the Virtual Brain model.
Jirsa noted it is important to study brain dynamics in the resting stage. He underlined a major focus of this work is to study the model with neural dynamics in the resting stage, in order for models to be built from standard neuroimaging data.
“The resting state is not just a simple, idle state where not much is happening [ . . . ] What is happening at rest is that there is exploration, a large repertoire of different networks,” explained Jirsa. “And so there are large dynamics, complex dynamics, ongoing.”
Jirsa also touched on the philosophical aspect of the work. “I went back to Germany to study philosophy, because the answer was linked to cognition consciousness. How does a mind merge from a collection of neurons?”
He explained his interest in philosophy stems from wanting to understand how something as complex as human behaviour and cognition can emerge from brain matter. To do this, he “sought out a leading mathematician working on the field of self-organization.”
The theory of self-organization is a way of understanding how humans organize community behaviour and global order. Human behaviour is “not just a movement time, or a reaction time, behaviour is very complex,” said Jirsa. “That’s the reason why the theory of self organization, the initial motivation, has never left me. It’s still here.”
To learn more about The Virtual Brain Model, visit their website.
