We are excited to host Andrea Luppi who will present in the BeyondTheEdge Seminar series with a talk titledCompetitive interactions shape brain dynamics and computation across species
Adaptive cognition relies on cooperation across anatomically distributed brain circuits. However, specialized neural systems are also in constant competition for limited processing resources. How does the brain network architecture enable it to balance these cooperative and competitive tendencies? Here we use computational whole-brain modelling to integrate multimodal structural and functional data and examine the dynamical and computational relevance of cooperative and competitive interactions in the mammalian connectome. Across human, macaque, and mouse, we show that the architecture of the models that most faithfully reproduce brain activity consistently combines modular cooperative interactions with diffuse, long-range competitive interactions. The model with competitive interactions consistently outperforms the cooperative-only model, with an excellent fit to both spatial and dynamical properties of the living brain, which were not explicitly optimized but rather emerge spontaneously. Competitive interactions in the effective connectivity produce greater levels of synergistic information and local-global hierarchy, and lead to superior computational capacity when used for neuromorphic computing. Altogether, this work provides a mechanistic link between network architecture, dynamical properties, and computation in the mammalian brain.
Date & Time:
Friday, October 9th, 2026
15:00 Amsterdam time (CEST) / 14:00 UK time (BST)
About the Speaker:
Dr Andrea Luppi is a Principal Investigator at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, and Fellow of St John’s College Cambridge. His research is funded by the Wellcome Trust and a European Research Council Starter Grant. Prior to his current position he was a Banting and Molson Neuro-Engineering Fellow at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and he obtained his PhD in clinical neuroscience from the University of Cambridge after degrees in psychology and philosophy. His work investigates how brain function and consciousness arise from the complex interplay of brain architecture and dynamics. To this end, he combines approaches from information theory, network science and whole-brain computational modelling to investigate pharmacological and pathological perturbations of brain function across a broad array of species.
Meeting Link:
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/85029973271?pwd=aSKBdDFvJv3L94KeybXDa6IaX6Olax.1
Meeting ID: 850 2997 3271
Passcode: 121358