We had a workshop on “Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD) and Related Neurological Phenomena” at the Fields Institute in Toronto, Canada. All talks are available online here. CSD is a phenomemon that links neuronal activity in the brain during migraine with aura to stroke and epilepsy. The common factor is disturbed ion homeostasis in the cortex.

The Fields Institute in Toronto is an international centre for research in mathematical sciences, which may sound surprising as this workshop is seemingly about neurology. In fact, we had and needed a good mixture of people from neurology, physiology, neurosurgery, neural control engineering, psychology, theoretical physics, and mathematics to fully cover CSD in 19 talks and 4 open discussions.

To get started, I can truly recommend the first talk by Bernice Grafstein, a former president of the Society of Neuroscience, a current Trustee and Vice-President of the Grass Foundation and Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, the
Vincent and Brooke Astor Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Dr. Grafstein talks about the early days of CSD and the particular people who are important in this field. From Aristides Leão, who discovered CSD, to Albert M. Grass, who built and improved multi-channel electroencephalographs (EEG), to Benedict Burns, her supervisor, to Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, who provided the first mathematical model, to Eric Kandel, who had to do CSD research as a “penalty” before he was allowed to perform his research, and to many, many more …

Of course, I also like to highlight the three talks from my own group, which are linked below.

Ghost behavior: Transient localized patterns of cortical spreading depression in the gyrencephlic human cortex

Dynamics from seconds to hours in Hodgkin-Huxley model with time- dependent ion concentrations and buffer reservoirs

Nucleation and front and pulse propagation