Norberto Garcia-Cairasco

Seizures, Epilepsies, and Neuropsychiatric Comorbidities are broad and general names for a group of complex entities with a profound impact on the behavior of sensory, motor, emotional, memory and/or cognitive networks. In the scenario of homeostasis, during real-life activities, brain networks can express their enormous diversity, and complexity through sensory communication and plasticity, motor imagining or execution, and marvelous cognition, among dozens of other functions which, integrated, give emergence to even more complex processes such as behavior and consciousness. In these cases, however, we still know very little about their precise underlying causation in terms of development, control, learning, and plasticity processes along the dynamics of the lifetime. Furthermore, with additional complexity, when deleterious, pathological, aberrant/chaotic/abnormal activity, such as those presented in the Epilepsies and their associated Neuropsychiatric Comorbidities, we also do not really know about the relationships in time and space of the myriad of factors and events that produce different semiology after trauma, lesions, or dysfunctions, all of them translated into neuroplastic abnormal entities. We would like to know, in fact, how much different integrated methods such as video capture, structural and functional imaging, surface or deep electrophysiology, microscopy, cell and molecular biology (omics) are, in an integrated form, usually with computational, virtual simulation and modeling tools, used to reveal specific signatures of those alterations, and what is their potential for disease modifications or treatment (pharmacological, surgical, neuromodulation). In addition, technological advances have allowed to deal with a huge amount of data coming from freely moving animals, human subjects, organoids, mini-brains, brain slices, cell cultures and in silico preparations.

Finally, our main goal is to discuss the Epilepsies and Neuropsychiatric Comorbidities, using methods of complex systems with associated emergence properties, computational modeling, and deep and machine learning. We will present how scientists worldwide are dealing with such amount of data, in such different scenarios, ideally with big data coming from multinational collaborative efforts (e.g., Blue Brain Project, Allen Brain Institute, Epilepsy without Walls, Epilepsy Global Project, Distributed Archives for Neurophysiology Data Integration, Neuroscience Multi-Omic Archive, among other platforms). We will also discuss critically how much they are, or should be, open to sharing and collaborative endeavors.