Aloha

Alas and alack, &c, I haven’t been able to update much recently. I’ve just returned to Cambridge, which has been having unusually glorious weather, and have been unpacking various things. I’ve also been busy getting up to speed with the research project I’m doing this year, on (essentially) information processing in neurones.

What this means is that I’ll be using various information theory methods to try and determine whether the pattern of spike impulses given by neurones actually encodes information, and if so, how does it do it and what kind of information is it. This is pretty interesting stuff that hasn’t been done before, and it’s also quite daunting to me because while I’ve had a very casual interest in cryptography and information theory, I’m never become familiar with the equations involved.

I’ll be mixing traditional neuroscience and ‘wet biology’ practical methods with processor-intensive number crunching during my research, and I have to admit that this was not what I’d been expecting to do this year, not that I’m not looking forward to it.

Before all of that I’ve got to read a hundred-odd pages of background research and start learning a new programming language (MatLab)…