The Bernstein Student Workshop Series is an initiative of the student members of the Bernstein Network. It provides a unique opportunity to enhance the technical exchange on a peer-to-peer basis. The series is motivated by the idea of bridging the gap between theoretical and experimental neuroscience by bringing together methodological expertise in the network. Unlike conventional workshops, a talented junior scientist will first give a tutorial about a specific theoretical or experimental technique, and then give a talk about their own research to demonstrate how the technique helps to address neuroscience questions. The workshop series is designed to cover a wide range of theoretical and experimental techniques and to elucidate how different techniques can be applied to answer different types of neuroscience questions. Combining the technical tutorial and the research talk, the workshop series aims to promote knowledge sharing in the community and enhance in-depth discussions among students from diverse backgrounds.

The Bernstein Student Workshop Series is an initiative of the student members of the Bernstein Network. It provides a unique opportunity to enhance the technical exchange on a peer-to-peer basis. The series is motivated by the idea of bridging the gap between theoretical and experimental neuroscience by bringing together methodological expertise in the network. Unlike conventional workshops, a talented junior scientist will first give a tutorial about a specific theoretical or experimental technique, and then give a talk about their own research to demonstrate how the technique helps to address neuroscience questions. The workshop series is designed to cover a wide range of theoretical and experimental techniques and to elucidate how different techniques can be applied to answer different types of neuroscience questions. Combining the technical tutorial and the research talk, the workshop series aims to promote knowledge sharing in the community and enhance in-depth discussions among students from diverse backgrounds.

The Bernstein Student Workshop Series is an initiative of the student members of the Bernstein Network. It provides a unique opportunity to enhance the technical exchange on a peer-to-peer basis. The series is motivated by the idea of bridging the gap between theoretical and experimental neuroscience by bringing together methodological expertise in the network. Unlike conventional workshops, a talented junior scientist will first give a tutorial about a specific theoretical or experimental technique, and then give a talk about their own research to demonstrate how the technique helps to address neuroscience questions. The workshop series is designed to cover a wide range of theoretical and experimental techniques and to elucidate how different techniques can be applied to answer different types of neuroscience questions. Combining the technical tutorial and the research talk, the workshop series aims to promote knowledge sharing in the community and enhance in-depth discussions among students from diverse backgrounds.

Neuroscience is witnessing extraordinary progress in experimental techniques, especially at the neural circuit level. These advances are largely aimed at enabling us to understand precisely how neural circuit computations mechanistically cause behavior. Establishing this type of causal understanding will require multiple perturbational (e.g optogenetic) experiments. It has been unclear exactly how many such experiments are needed and how this number scales with the size of the nervous system in question. Here, using techniques from Theoretical Computer Science, we prove that establishing the most extensive notions of understanding need exponentially-many experiments in the number of neurons, in many cases, unless a widely-posited hypothesis about computation is false (i.e. unless P = NP). Furthermore, using data and estimates, we demonstrate that the feasible experimental regime is typically one where the number of experiments performable scales sub-linearly in the number of neurons in the nervous system. This remarkable gulf between the worst-case and the feasible suggests an algorithmic barrier to such an understanding. Determining which notions of understanding are algorithmically tractable to establish in what contexts, thus, becomes an important new direction for investigation. TL; DR: Non-existence of tractable algorithms for neural circuit interrogation could pose a barrier to comprehensively understanding how neural circuits cause behavior. Preprint: https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/639724v1/…