December 14, 2010- 3:30 p.m.
Location: Fields Institute

Bard Ermentrout, University of Pittsburgh
Double or Nothing: The Blinking Brain
In this talk, I discuss two kinds of visual phenomena that are produced by periodically forcing the visual system. In both cases, spatiotemporal patterns are generated by nonlinear interactions of the stimulus with the underlying dynamics of the visual system. Period doubling bifurcations
lead to slowly modulated bistability in one case and spontaneous symmetry breaking in the other. Normal form analysis allows us to also explain why some patternsare seen at low frequencies while others are seen at high strobe frequencies.The talk will be accessible to graduate students.

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