UBC Math Bio Seminar: Marty Golubitsky (Online)

Binocular rivalry explores the question of how the brain copes with contradictory information. A subject is shown two different pictures – one to each eye. What images does the subject perceive? Results from rivalry experiments usually lead to alternation of percepts and are often surprising. Hugh Wilson proposed modeling rivalry in the brain by using structured networks of differential equations. We use Wilson networks as modeling devices and equivariant Hopf bifurcation as a tool to both post-dict and predict experimentally observed percepts. This work is joint with Casey Diekman, Zhong-Lin Lu, Tyler McMillen, Ian Stewart, Yunjiao Wang, and Yukai Zhao.