Seminar · Computational Neuroscience
Using noise to probe recurrent neural network structure and prune synapses
Rishidev Chaudhuri · University of California, Davis
Fri, Sep 25, 2020 · 06:00 UTC
Many networks in the brain are sparsely connected, and the brain eliminates synapses during development and learning. How could the brain decide which synapses to prune? In a recurrent network, determining the importance of a synapse between two neurons is a difficult computational problem, depending on the role that both neurons play and on all possible pathways of information flow between them. Noise is ubiquitous in neural systems, and often considered an irritant to be overcome. In the first part of this talk, I will suggest that noise could play a functional role in synaptic pruning, allo