Perturbing Complex Networks
- Date published: 2026-10-26
- Speakers: Debanik Bhattacharjee (postdoc, Hebrew University), guest talk with discussion
- Format: Guest talk
- Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IWGvY04bCA
- Topics: Bioelectricity
In one paragraph
A postdoc whose PhD was on fluid flow through porous materials shows how he studies complex systems by disturbing them and reading the response. Most of the talk uses pore networks (oil and water moving through a chip of pillars) as a test bed, and he says he is starting to carry the same approach over to neural systems, with early results not ready to show.
Main ideas (plain words)
- The method: perturb a system, measure the response, infer the mechanism.
- In pore networks he asks whether the spread of pore sizes can be used as a design parameter to shape how flow invades the network over time.
- He plans to borrow a complexity measure from a recent PNAS paper by a lab colleague and apply it to perturbation in neural systems.
- In the discussion, Levin suggests modeling how voltage states spread through tissues, and describes grafting tissue from two-headed flatworms into one-headed hosts.
Key quotes (word for word from YouTube's auto-generated captions)
"you perturb a system and then, you know, you measure the response. You try to infer a mechanism."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IWGvY04bCA&t=120s"the core theme of my work was to understand, you know, whether heterogeneity can be exploited as an explicit, you know, designable parameter by controlling some kind of pore size statistics"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IWGvY04bCA&t=540sSource: YouTube auto-generated captions, speakers not labeled; wording is provisional. Timestamps point to the start of the 30-second stretch that holds the quote.