Organised Chaos: How the Brain Constructs Reality

The brain is a noisy and chaotic network, shuttling information from place to place. This talk will look at some of the principles that underlie brain networks, making use of mathematical models and network theory in health and disease. This will be a trip through an emerging story that is fundamental to our understanding of how our brains are beautifully, if a little chaotically, put together.

When it is said that we ‘localize’ an object, what does it mean? It means that we create a representation in our minds of the movements that are necessary to reach that object. For the French mathematician Henry Poincaré, motion is at the heart of the perceptual construction of space. Starting from his intuition, we will discuss how animals create a representation of space for interacting with the world.

One of the most mysterious experiences that we come across in psychiatry is "psychosis", which refers to a loss of contact with reality. It has many causes and manifestations and it poses major challenges to our understanding. I propose the view that it can actually be understood in terms of the normal functioning of the mind, which seeks to construct a working model of reality even though it has very little direct contact with that reality.