Unsupervised Thinking

Sloppiness, stiffness, and stomatogastric ganglion! This episode on underdeterminacy in neural circuits will introduce you to all these topics, as well as to special guest Alex Williams! To start, we take you way back to algebra class with a refresher on what makes a system "underdetermined" (essentially, more unknowns than constraints). There are two ways this can be a problem in neuroscience: (1) neural circuit modelers don't have enough data to constrain their models, and (2) biology itself is underconstrained, leading to differences across individuals within a species. We talk about both of these issues separately, the ways in which they interact, and the practical effects they have for the study of the nervous system. The first topic spurs a broad discussion on the philosophy of modelling and the potential pitfalls that careful scientists need to avoid. To explore this in more detail, we discuss an excellent modelling paper on the oculor-motor system that demonstrates ways in which models should guide ex