Location: Main Auditorium, Toronto Western Hospital

Epilepsy - the propensity toward recurrent, unprovoked seizure - is a devastating disease affecting 65 million people worldwide. Understanding and treating this disease remains a challenge, as seizures manifest through mechanisms and features that span spatial and temporal scales. In this talk, we will examine some aspects of this challenge through the analysis and modeling of human brain voltage activity recorded simultaneously across microscopic and macroscopic spatial scales. We will focus on two proposals: (1) that human seizure terminate in a critical transition, and (2) that rapidly propagating waves of activity sweep across the cortex during seizure. In each case, we will describe a corresponding computational model to propose specific mechanisms that support the observed spatiotemporal dynamics.