Speaker: Woodrow Shew Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, USA

Bio @ https://www.woodrowshew.com/

Title: Scale-free body movements directly linked to scale-free brain dynamics

Abstract: Over the years, it has been noticed by many scientists that animals (including humans) tend to move and behave in a peculiar way; their body movements are often scale-invariant, or scale-free, like a fractal. A separate line of research has shown that brain activity can also exhibit scale-free properties. Scale-free body movement is thought to confer advantages for survival, like optimizing search for food or other needs. Scale-free brain activity is also associated with certain advantages related to information processing. However, despite the similarities of these two lines of research, they have remained separate, without a unified explanation. Here we studied awake behaving mice and show that scale-free brain and body activity are directly linked. In this seminar, I will give a student-accessible introduction to these two lines of research and describe the results of our work linking them.