The Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum is a series of informal monthly meetings of Budapest-based computational neuroscientists and computational cognitive scientists with the aim of facilitating discussion and cooperation among researchers working in different institutes and giving an opportunity to students to present their work and get to know the comunity. Originally started in 2007, restarted in 2017 and then again in 2023 the Forum is now regularly hosted by Central European University, and followed by a social event, both open to anyone interested.
Events of the Forum are advertised on a mailing list. If you wish to be on this list or have any inquiries about the series, contact Mihály Bányai.
Upcoming meeting:
Time: February 27, Friday, 10:00 am
Location: CEU, 1051 Bp. Nádor u. 15, Room 101
Presenters: Morten L Kringelbach (University of Oxford) and Gustavo Deco (Pompeu Fabra University)
Titles and abstracts:
Whole-brain modelling. Cartography of eudaimonia and flourishing in the human brain
In order to survive, the brain must constantly extract, predict and recognise the essential
spacetime features of complex environments. This distributed computation of information
relies on having a hierarchy of optimal information transfer across the whole brain at the
lowest possible metabolic cost. Suboptimal brain orchestration has been linked to mental
illness, yet the fundamental principles of brain orchestration over fast and slow timescales are
still not well understood. I will show how significant progress has been made using whole-
brain modelling of neuroimaging data using new frameworks based on stochastic
thermodynamics and turbulence. A series of studies have already furthered our understanding
of human flourishing using data from experiments including music, food, social interactions,
meditation and psychedelics. Overall, this new evidence has given rise to a deeper
understanding of experiences that can give rise to both flourishing and suffering, providing
meaning and purpose to life, and may eventually help to find novel ways to rebalance the
brain in neuropsychiatric disorders.
The computing brain: Explaining cognition through a realistic whole-brain anatomically constrained-reservoir model
complex world by performing a rich repertoire of computation on a minimal energy budget.
The brain is much better at adapting to the multiplicity of stimuli and outcomes than current
generations of computers, artificial neural deep learning and reservoir model architectures.
Yet, at first glance the brain appears to use a fixed anatomical architecture to perform the
necessary huge variety of computations. But evolution’s boldest trick is that in fact
the brain’s effective connectivity is constantly being updated through neuromodulation to
allow the rich repertoire of computation. Inspired by this, we created a whole-brain model
using empirical neurotransmitter maps modulating the underlying local regional dynamics.
This NEMO (neurotransmission modulated) whole-brain model is able to flexibly compute
the full task repertoire and associated functional connectivity of the neuroimaging data from
971 healthy participants. For each individual we defined a measure of ‘brain computability’
as the fitting of the NEMO whole-brain model to all tasks performed by the individual.
Importantly, brain computability correlates with both behavioural performance on individual
tasks and with a general behavioural measure of intelligence. Overall, our proposed unifying
NEMO framework offers a natural way to sculpt different brain dynamics in a fixed brain
Earlier meetings of the Forum:
November 11, 2025. Zsigmond Benkő (Wigner Institute): Hidden Common Driver Reconstruction and the Anisotropic Self-Organizing Map
June 17, 2025. Keith T Murray (Wigner Institute): V1 signatures of generative computations in a discrimination task
November 5, 2024. József Konczer: Statistical Games, Playful approach to statistics. Recording here.
May 22, 2024. Nikola Milićević (Pennsylvania State University): Sensory systems and combinatorial neural codes. Recording here.
January 31, 2024. Zoltán Somogyvári (Wigner Institute): Seeing beyond the spikes: reconstructing the complete spatiotemporal membrane potential distribution from paired intra- and extracellular recordings
December 12, 2023. Máté Lengyel (Cambridge/CEU): Optimal information loading into working memory explains dynamic coding in prefrontal cortex. Recording here.
November 15, 2023. András Ecker (EPFL): Long-term plasticity induces sparse and specific synaptic changes in a biophysically detailed cortical model
October 25, 2023. Ferenc Csikor (Wigner Institute): Top-down perceptual inference shaping the activity of early visual cortex
October 4, 2023. Gábor Lengyel (University of Rochester): A General Method for Testing Bayesian Models Using Neural Data
September 1, 2023. Emmanuel Procyk (INSERM Lyon): Prefrontal neuronal dynamics, timescales, and behavioural flexibility
May 31, 2023. Atilla B. Kelemen (KOKI): Geometry of remapping in the hippocampus reflects task structure
April 26, 2023. Anna Székely (Wigner Institute): Identifying transfer learning in the reshaping of inductive biases
March 29, 2023. Merse Előd Gáspár (CEU): Discovering the internal predictive model of infants based on eye movements