Michael R. DeWeese

Assistant Professor (Physics, Neuroscience)

Research areas: Systems and Computational Neuroscience

Having to focus on one voice in a crowded room of boisterous speakers is a common experience for most of us, and we humans are extremely good at it, yet the latest algorithms running on the fastest modern computers fail miserably at isolating a single voice from a noisy background in all but the simplest cases. This demonstrates that attending to relevant sounds in our everyday environment poses a surprisingly challenging computational problem for the brain, despite how easy it may seem.  Understanding how the cerebral cortex solves this problem could point the way towards cures of attention related mental disorders, and suggest new approaches for designing man-made machines capable of intelligently processing real-world data.

In my laboratory we combine behavioral, physiological and theoretical methods to elucidate the role of the cortex during auditory sensory processing. We are currently developing a rodent model of selective auditory attention, with the long term goal of uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying our remarkable ability to attend to some sounds while blocking others.

Selected Publications

DeWeese, M.R. and Zador, A.M. (2006), Non-Gaussian membrane potential dynamics imply sparse, synchronous activity in auditory cortex. Journal of Neuroscience. 26(47), 12206-18.

DeWeese, M.R., Hromadka, T.,and Zador, A.M. (2005). Reliability and representational bandwidth in auditory cortex. Neuron 48, 5.

DeWeese, M.R. and Zador, A.M. (2004), Shared and private variability in the auditory cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology 92, 1840.

DeWeese, M.R., Wehr, M. and Zador, A.M. (2003). Binary spiking in auditory cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 23, 7940.

DeWeese, M.R. and Meister, M. (1999). How to measure the information gained from one symbol. Network 10, 325.

Buracas, G., Zador, A.M., DeWeese, M.R. and Albright, T. (1998). Efficient discrimination of temporal patterns by motion-sensitive neurons in primate visual cortex. Neuron 20, 959.

DeWeese, M.R. and Zador, A. (1998). Asymmetric dynamics in optimal variance adaptation. Neural Computation 10, 1179.

Bialek, W. and DeWeese, M. (1995). Random switching and optimal processing in the perception of ambiguous signals. Physical Review Letters 74, 3077.