COMPUTATIONAL NEURODYNAMICS - HOW NERVOUS SYSTEM GENERATES MOTION?

The ambitious objective of computational neuroscience is to find general rules of brain organization and function. By organization we usually mean the pattern of connections between neurons, and by function the dynamics of neural networks in some context. In this talk, I will focus on undulatory locomotion of a tiny worm called C. elegans. This animal is a good system for biological modeling because we know a great deal about its cellular and molecular organization. I will present some results concerning C. elegans biomechanics, its neural structure, and oscillatory neural dynamics leading to worm locomotion.