The end of an exciting poster presentation

Author: Sam Sooter | Major: Physics, Mathematics | Semester: Spring 2025

I’m a junior physics and math major interested in how the brain gives rise to mind and
behavior. It’s an exciting time to be a neuroscience trainee. Technological advances in
recent years have made it possible for the first time to collect massively parallel neural
recordings with single-neuron resolution in awake, behaving animals. This wealth of
data presents a huge opportunity, but also many challenges, the biggest of which is
‘what should we do with it?’ For example, the March issue of Nature spotlighted the
MICrONs collaboration (Allen Institute + Baylor School of Medicine + Princeton), which
collected a near-exhaustive functional and anatomical map of a 1 mm^3 chunk of
mouse cortex. This is amazing, but it doesn’t immediately answer the big question (‘how
does the brain work?’) or even the smaller question (‘how does a 1 mm^3 chunk of
cortex work?). For that, we need imaginative new computational and theoretical tools.

During the funding period of this SURF grant, I developed an information-theoretic
quantification of the brain’s proximity to a special dynamical regime called ‘criticality.’ I
presented this work at the COSYNE 2025 (COmputational and SYstems NEuroscience)
conference in Montreal. It was by far the best conference I have been to. With about
1000 attendees, COSYNE strikes a nice middle-ground between a huge conference like
SfN (Society for Neuroscience conference, ~20000 attendees) and a small workshop.
Some of the work presented at COSYNE was (there’s no other word) epic; for example,
one talk featured wireless recordings of neural activity in bat hippocampus as the bat
freely navigated on a remote island in Tanzania. I was inspired by all the cool science,
and I was grateful to have a chance to share my work. I’m interested in the hypothesis
that the brain operates near ‘criticality,’ i.e. near a boundary between different dynamical
regimes. Measuring nearness to criticality from neural data is tricky; unlike the
condensed matter systems for which theory of critical phenomena was developed,
brains are hard to control. We don’t have knowledge of or the ability to manipulate all of
the control parameters for the brain. This makes the established machinery for studying
critical phenomena impractical for the brain. My SURF-funded project is about filling this
gap.

Other exciting COSYNE events were (1) meeting a postdoc in the lab that I am working
in this summer, (2) going on a group run in the snow with some other attendees, and (3)
meeting some of my favorite scientists (i.e. people whose work I had read and
appreciated, but who I had never met in-person before). Another valuable output of
COSYNE is that I am now (almost) convinced that I want to pursue a neuroscience
(rather than e.g. physics or biophysics) PhD. I hope to go to COSYNE again next year
in Lisbon. By that time I will be wrapping up my last semester as an undergrad and
deciding where to go for my PhD. I’m grateful to my PI Woodrow Shew, others in the
Shew Lab, the ADHE, the Honors College, and all who have helped make my time as
an undergrad so rich with exciting experiences like COSYNE.