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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">FYI</span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><img width="124" height="117" style="width:1.2916in;height:1.2187in" id="_x0000_i1025" src="cid:image001.jpg@01DCB77E.4626C320"></span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">ANNOUNCEMENT</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">ABC & SILS-Center for Neuroscience Seminar</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">You are cordially invited to attend:</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">“What’s in a positronic brain? -</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> What are the essential biological features</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">of future neuromorphic intelligence?</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">By Dr. Mario Negrello</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Department of Neuroscience,</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Host: Cyriel Pennartz</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Date: Friday, March 27, 2026</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Time: 16:00 – 17:00 hrs</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Location: Room A1.16, Science Park 904</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Abstract</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Abstract:</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Neuromorphic engineering is often justified pragmatically: faster computers, lower power, or better AI. In this talk I take a different starting point and ask: what features of real brains are
non-negotiable if we want a system that is genuinely neuromorphic, not just softly “brain-inspired”?</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">I take a cognitive–neuroscientific perspective on intelligence as sense-making within a narrow
<i>cognitive Goldilocks zone</i>: a slice of physics where time, space, and energy are processed in human-scale units and where cognition is emphatically
<i>not</i> scale-invariant. I contrast this with the abstraction of universal Turing computation, in which the material substrate and many physical constraints are deliberately erased. This abstraction has been extraordinarily fruitful for AI, but it also obscures
how biological tissue gives rise to specific boundary conditions, dynamics, and emergent information.</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> I then revisit the “apples and oranges” comparison between brains, digital computers, and artificial neural networks, arguing that current neuromorphic platforms mostly re-implement spiking
point neurons and fixed connectivity, while neglecting key biological phenomena. I highlight in particular ongoing activity-dependent plasticity, homeostasis, heterogeneous populations, and representational drift—features that make biological intelligence
robust, adaptive, and history-dependent, yet are largely absent from today’s hardware and learning rules.</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Finally, I propose a short list of neuromorphic non-negotiables—such as ubiquitous multi-scale plasticity, population coding with drifting representations, and the explicit use of delays—as
design targets for the next generation of neuromorphic systems, and discuss how these impact on our theories of cognition.</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Bio:</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Mario Negrello obtained a mechanical engineering degree in Brazil (1997), and after a period in the industry (1997-2004) obtained a Masters and a PhD degree (2009, summa cum laude) in Cognitive
Science at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. At the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin (Germany) for Intelligent Dynamics and Autonomous Systems, Mario researched artificial evolution of neural network controllers for autonomous robots (2007/09),
including a period as a visiting researcher at the Aerospace Engineering dept. at Cornell University (with Hod Lipson). His first postdoc was in the Computational Neuroscience laboratory at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (with Erik De Schutter)
studying large scale computational models of the cerebellum. Currently he is assistant professor in the department of neuroscience in the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, where he combines empirical research and computational models (dept. head Chris De
Zeeuw). Mario has published in the fields of Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience, Cognitive Robotics, Evolutionary Robotics, Neuroethology, as well as a monograph published by Springer US in the Cognitive and Neural Systems series entitled Invariants
of Behavior (2012).</span></b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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