“Discovering the Human Connectome”
Olaf Sporns, PhD
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences,
Programs in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, Indiana University

April 5, 2012
11:00am – 12:00pm
Neuroscience Research Building (NRB 132)

Recent advances in network science have greatly increased our understanding of many complex networked systems, ranging from transportation networks, to social networks, the internet, ecosystems, and biochemical and gene transcription pathways. Network approaches are also increasingly applied in the context of neuroscience, at several levels of scale from cells to circuits and large-scale systems. A broad range of empirical strategies aim at creating comprehensive maps of the brain’s connections, the connectome. Initial results obtained from the first connectome maps of the human brain reveal a number of characteristic topological features, including small-world attributes, modularity and hubs, and a pronounced core and rich-club organization. Dr. Sporns will review how recent network studies have given us new insights into the brain’s connection topology, and how these studies provide new insight into the relationship between structure and functional dynamics.