Pint of View Lecture Over Drinks: The Brain’s GPS—What can AI learn from the brain?

About

Welcome to Pint of View – Bangalore's first-ever community for lectures over drinks. Every week, we bring together curious minds to learn about everything from space exploration and evolutionary biology to public policy, history, and culture, all in the relaxed setting of a neighbourhood pub. **About the lecture** Your brain does things that today's AI still can't. You learn new things without forgetting the old, you can pick up a new idea from a handful of examples (not millions), and you do it all on about the power of a dim lightbulb. How? In this talk, Sarthak will zoom in on one small, seahorse-shaped region deep in the brain, the hippocampus, home of memory and your inner sense of direction. Along the way, we'll meet grid cells: neurons that fire in beautiful hexagonal patterns as you move through space, and that may act like a built-in clothesline on which the brain hangs all its memories. We'll see why a memory system built this way can store far more, fades gracefully rather than crashing, and may even explains that maddening tip-of-the-tongue feeling, where you know you know something but can't quite recall it. We'll also ask where this tidy organization comes from. It turns out that smooth, gradual variations across the brain can spontaneously sort themselves into distinct, specialized modules, with no outside designer required, unlike the way engineers hand-build structure into AI today. Join us for a look at how the brain stores and organizes memories, and what that might mean for building smarter machines. **About the Speaker** Dr. Sarthak Chandra’s research sits at the intersection of physics and neuroscience, focusing on understanding how structure and function emerge together in neural circuits. He uses a variety of theoretical and computational tools drawn from nonlinear dynamics, neuroscience and machine learning to understand how artificial and biological neural networks organize themselves as they learn to compute. Sarthak did his undergraduate degree in Physics from IIT Kanpur, and his PhD in Physics from the University of Maryland, College Park. After his PhD, he decided to switch fields and move into neuroscience, joining the Brain and Cognitive Science department at MIT first as a postdoctoral researcher, and then as a Research Scientist. In 2025 he moved back to India, where he is now a Murty Science Fellow, a faculty member at the ICTS-TIFR, and faculty associate at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). **Event Details** - Wednesday, 14 October | 7 pm to 9 pm - The Porcupine, 100 ft road, Indiranagar **What your ticket includes** - 1 complimentary beer or a mocktail **What to Expect:** - A 60-minute lecture - 30 minutes of interactive Q&A - Social mixer and personal Q&As with the lecturer **About Pint of View** Inspired by the successful Lectures on Tap community in the U.S., Pint of View brings this format to India for the first time. It’s where big ideas meet bar tables, and where you enjoy a drink in h…

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