The Institute for Complex Systems at the National Research Council in Florence (Italy) invites applications for a one year Postdoctoral Scholar in the fields of computational neuroscience, complex networks and nonlinear dynamics. The successful applicant is expected to work closely with a multidisciplinary research team led by Dr. Simona Olmi on problems related to neuroscience. Specific topics of interest include but are not limited to the investigation of biologically realistic large-scale brain activity, the emergence of coupling between neural oscillations in neural architectures, the derivation of neural mass models in presence of short-term synaptic plasticity and/or spike-frequency adaptation as well as applications on brain structural connectivity matrices. Successful candidates are expected to primarily conduct computational and data driven research taking advantage of our international network of experimental collaborators and/or clinical partners.

The question of how syntactic structure can be built at the neural level has come to the forefront of cognitive neuroscience in the last decade. Neural oscillations have been widely recognised as playing an important role in building syntactic representations. In this talk I will review existing oscillatory approaches to syntactic structure building and assess their functionality in light of basic properties of a hierarchical syntactic structure, such as varied length of syntactic phrases, nesting of constituents, overlap in length between different levels of the syntactic hierarchy and others. I will also briefly discuss key requirements on neural structure building mechanisms from the perspective of a real-time parser.

The ability to remember spatial environments is critical for everyday life. In this talk, I will discuss my lab’s findings on how the human brain supports spatial memory and navigation based on our experiments with direct brain recordings from neurosurgical patients performing virtual-reality spatial memory tasks. I will show that humans have a network of neurons that represent where we are located and trying to go. This network includes some cell types that are similar to those seen in animals, such as place and grid cells, as well as others that have not been seen before in animals, such as anchor and spatial-target cells. I also will explore the role of network oscillations in human memory, where humans again show several distinctive patterns compared to animals. Whereas rodents generally show a hippocampal oscillation at ~8Hz, humans have two separate hippocampal oscillations, at low and high frequencies, which support memory and navigation, respectively. Finally, I will show that neural oscillations in humans are traveling waves, propagating across the cortex, to coordinate the timing of neuronal activity across regions, which is another property not seen in animals. A theme from this work is that in terms of navigation and memory the human brain has novel characteristics compared with animals, which helps explain our rich behavioural abilities and has implications for treating disease and neurological disorders.