25 June 2021
Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo
Systems Bioengineering Program
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona, SPAIN
Living organisms must monitor the dynamics of their environment continuously, in order to adapt to present conditions and anticipate future changes. But anticipation requires processing temporal information, which in turn requires memory. In this talk I will discuss a possible mechanism through which cells and simple nervous systems can perform such dynamical information processing by leveraging the recurrent architecture of gene regulatory and neuronal networks, respectively. I will also discuss the size requirements that recurrent networks must fulfill under realistic biological conditions, in order to provide such a dynamic representation of the world. Finally, I will argue that recurrence in biological networks enables not only short-term memory, but also the long-term storage of information, through a phenomenon reminiscent of generalized chaos synchronization.