 Maxwell Wang is our fifth presenter and his three-minute thesis title is A Week in the Life of the Human Brain, Stable States Punctuated by Chaotic-like Transitions. Hello, my name is Maxwell Wang. I'm an MD-PC student that is joined between neurocomputation and machine learning and today I'll be talking to you about what happens when you decide to record from the human brain for a week straight. Your brain is actually a pretty slow dynamical system. Whether you are energetic or tired, happy or stressed, whether you're bored of watching Netflix and ready to talk with a friend, all these things change slowly on the order of minutes to hours as we go through our chaotic everyday lives. But the vast majority of neuroscience that studies brain activity will study it by on the order of milliseconds to seconds while people do highly controlled experiments inside a functional MRI machine. Our question was is that what does the brain do over very long time periods in natural environment? We used 20 human patients who had electrodes surgically implanted inside their heads and recorded them from a continuous week long period. During this time, the patients were confined to the hospital but they were free to eat, sleep, talk with friends and family, play games on a smartphone and more while under simultaneous neural and video recordings that tells exactly what are they doing and when. We found that the brain would undergo a punctuated equilibrium of stable states and chaotic transitions between them. When the brain would enter a stable state, its activity would remain very neatly organized and consistent over minutes to hours and we found that if you told us what state somebody's brain was in, we could predict their behavior such as were they reading a book or are they playing games on their phone as well as figuring out things about their physiological status such as things like their circadian rhythm, their arousal and their heart rate. When the patient's behavior was changing such as if they were going from browsing their phone and then somebody walked into the room as our time in conversation with them, the brain would also switch states but it wouldn't switch states by just going directly from one state to another one. It would just take these crazy roundabout very chaotic routes. It would be as if if I were to travel between Pittsburgh International Airport in Chicago hair instead of going for a direct flight between these two places instead I said okay well I'm going to take a transfer flight to London then I'm going to go to Hawaii then I'm going to Moscow and now I decided now it's time to come to Chicago. Why does the brain do this? We think this is due to a structural limitation of the brain. Your brain tomorrow structurally it's almost identical to how it was today but your brain has no idea what you need to do tomorrow it doesn't even know what you want to need to do an hour from now or five minutes from now. Having the brain do these sort of random explorations where as a scrappily flicking networks on and off until it figures out what is the right state for it to adapt to your environment maybe how our brains cope with our ever changing real lives. What is a broader implication this kind of work? Almost every single disease of the brain that you can think of changes on the order of hours to days somebody with Alzheimer's dementia somebody with depression somebody with delirium none of these diseases are constantly bad people have good days they have bad days if we can figure out how does the brain transition between different behavioral and physiological states then why can we figure out how does the brain transition in and out of a disease state and figure out how we're going to stop that process. Thank you for your time.