Energy Consumption and Information Processing in Neurons
- When?
- Tuesday 1 February 2011, 14:00 to 15:00
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Dr Jeremy Niven, Royal Society University Research Fellow, Department of Zoology, The Cambridge Neuroscience Community, University of Cambridge
The nervous system is under selective pressure to generate adaptive behavior but at the same time is subject to costs related to the amount of energy neural signalling consumes. Characterizing this cost-benefit trade-off is essential for understanding the function and evolution of nervous systems, including our own.
My work combines measures of energy consumption with those of information processing to assess the contributions of various neural components to energy consumption, using insect photoreceptors as an experimental system. In particular, my work investigates how basic biophysical relationships determine the energy efficiency of information processing in neurons. This work has emphasized that neurons are subject to a law of diminishing returns that severely penalizes excess functional capacity with increased energetic costs.
Recent work from my lab has extended this analysis by determining the energy consumption of neuronal action potentials and whether neurons optimize the trade-off between information processing and energy consumption.
