February 4, 2015

Mathematics to reveal the secrets of the brain




(Feb.4, '15)  Top researchers will now be using mathematical modelling and heavy computations to understand how the brain can both remember and learn.

Ten years ago, when the team of Marianne Fyhn and Torkel Hafting Fyhn cooperated with the Nobel Prize winning team of May-Britt and Edvard Moser at NTNU, they discovered the sense of orientation in the brain.

Now, in their own brain research group at the University of Oslo, they are studying how the brain is able to store new memories while being so stable that old memories are not diminished. They have recently established close cooperation with the foremost computation experts at the University of Oslo. Because regardless of how many experiments they do, they are dependent on mathematical expertise to find the connections between the enormous number of processes in the brain.