Building Scaling Models of Nervous Systems

The nervous systems of animals are collectives of neurons that form interaction networks and compute information processing, allowing organisms to function and interact with their environment. One of the most consistent emergent properties in these systems is the scaling relationships among different components, such as brain size and body size. A scaling relationship is a functional relationship between two variables, say number of neurons and a measure of a systems scale, say body size, such that multiplicative increases in body size result in multiplicative increases in number of neurons regardless of the starting scale. Examples include relationships between gray matter and white matter, number of neurons and brain size, brain size, and body size, among others. This meeting will work to address the question of how these scaling relationships emerge. We will using urban scaling a metabolic scaling theory as examples which have successfully built phenomenological models of scaling from first principles.