In order to survive, all organisms (including humans!) have to solve many
problems. One very important class of problems involves measuring and
understanding what is happening in the world around us: Armed with eyes,
ears, noses and the sensors in our skin, our brains take in enormous
amounts of data, and for the most part we make sense out of all these data
without even being aware that we are solving very difficult problems --
problems that still defeat the most powerful computers. There are obvious
advantages to accomplishing these tasks more efficiently, but the laws of
physics tell us that there are limits to how precisely any organism or
machine could function. Remarkably, animals operate very close to these
fundamental physical limits, so that our sensory systems are "almost
perfect." I will give examples of this perfection, and emphasize that in
order to operate near the physical limits organisms must build special
mechanisms whose structure we can predict from physical principles.
Audio of Introduction by David Gross, KITP Director.
Dr. Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in
Physics at Princeton University. He is also an associated faculty
member in the Department of Molecular Biology, and a member of the
multidisciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute. His research interests
have ranged over a wide variety of theoretical problems at the
interface of physics and biology, from the dynamics of individual
biological molecules to learning and cognition. He is best known for
contributions to our understanding of coding and computation in the
brain. Bialek and collaborators have shown that aspects of brain
function can be described as essentially optimal strategies for
adapting to the complex dynamics of the world, making the most of
the available signals in the face of fundamental physical
constraints and limitations.
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