Keynote and public debate with Einstein Visiting Fellow Roger Traub.
We have explored almost the entire surface of the earth, have been to the moon and manned space flights to Mars are being planned. But in the exploration of our innermost being, our brain, we are only just at the beginning. Einstein Visiting Fellow Roger Traub invites you on a journey into the brain, explains the challenges research is facing and what route he takes to get to the bottom of the secrets.
The important goals of Neuroscience are:
- First of all clinical, to improve the prevention and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders.
- Second technological, to gather hints how we might imitate brain functions in intelligent artifacts and software.
- And third the underlying philosophical goal, to understand our own origins and nature.
Why are these goals so difficult to achieve, despite extreme efforts by tens of thousands of researchers? Why is it so hard to understand the brain? According to Roger Traub these goals require that that we should be able to relate "psychological" functions to the behaviors of large networks of cells. How? By expressing the properties and connections of these networks in equations and in a mathematical language.
