Physics Colloquium, May 11, 2010
Song Birds: A Physicist's Approach Henry Abarbanel

University of California San Diego

Vocalization for functional purposes is expressed in song by a large group of avian species. The pattern of learning, maintaining, and utilizing song has similarities to human speech activity. The investigation of the neural circuitry underlying song production and feedback in those circuits used to maintain song requires an understanding of the input/output responses of the neurons and the connections among them in the avian brain. Collecting the necessary data on voltage activity and transferring information from that to models of the avian circuits is similar in essential ways to many challenges in making quantitative models of physical and biological systems.

We discuss these similarities and describe an exact statistical physics formulation in terms of a path integral of how one can accomplish the information transfer in nonlinear, possibly chaotic, systems occurring when few variables are measured, the measurements are noisy, and there are errors in the model. Namely, in the usual case.

After exercising the methods on some simple systems with complex behavior, we return to birdsong and discuss how one may use the tools to analyze experiments on individual neurons from the birdsong system and plans for extending the study to the songbird neural circuitry. Other examples of the use of the general principles will be discussed as well.

Dr. Abarbanel's Web Site

4:00 p.m., Physics Research Building (PRB), Room 1080

Reception at 3:45 p.m., Atrium, PRB