Welcome back to Beyond the Patterns. So today we want to continue our tour through different

science topics and explore different fields of related sciences that may turn in useful

if you're a researcher in machine learning or pattern recognition and a particular topic

that I'm always interested in is neurobiology.

So today I have invited Professor Dr. Holger Schulze from the University Clinic of Erlangen

and he wants to tell us a little bit about neurobiology of memory and learning.

So Professor Schulze studied biology at the Technical University of Darmstadt where he

graduated and did his PhD on sound processing in the auditory cortex of Mongolian gerbils.

In 1996 he moved to the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg where he started

his own group and worked on mechanisms of learning and memory in the auditory system.

In 2003 he finished his habillitation in physiology at the medical school of the Otto von Gureke

University in Magdeburg.

In 2007 he followed a call to Erlangen where he is now an associate professor for experimental

auto laryngology.

His main research topics are now the neurophysiological mechanisms of hearing, tinnitus and sleep.

So I'm very much looking forward to this presentation and Holger, the stage is yours.

Thank you very much for the invitation.

So as already has been announced I will give you some insight into the neurobiology of

learning and memory from the perspective of really a biologist.

I know that most of you or many of you are into artificial neural networks and so this

is to give you some kind of idea how it works in biological systems and at some point I

will also try to make some comparisons between information processing living brains and in

computers.

Also I'm surely not an expert for the second part.

But anyway let's start with the talk.

So why should we study the brain at all?

And especially if you're interested in learning and memory formation.

So just to make an analogy let's say you would be interested in a system like this and you

want to know how this works, how it drives, how it can move.

Just looking at this car is probably hard to get an idea how it works if you have no

idea how this machine inside works, so the motor that is driving the car forward.

And I think it's pretty similar for a system like this.

So if you are interested in learning and you want to study what's happening when for example

children learn or also animals learn and what kind of neural processes underlie this learning

then it's probably a good idea to also look inside those heads and the brains and study

the mechanisms that are really working when brains are learning.

Right in the beginning I want to make you aware of the fact that learning is very individual.

So we have different types of learners that use different strategies to learn.

We also have good and bad learners for sure that you know that from your own experiences.

And we have some people who prefer to learn on their own for example from a book but others

need a teacher to have a really good learning.

Some need auditory information, some are more into visual information.

All these kinds of differences are very individual when it comes to learning.

And I will detail this a little bit more later through the talk.

But first of all let's have a look at some neurobiological basics.

So this is a human brain you probably all know and the biggest structure that you may

recognize here is this biggest part here of the brain.

This is the so-called neocortex.

This is a structure that in the evolution is very new and it also has grown the most

from all the structures in the brain throughout the late evolution.