nikjag blog

so i built a simulation of schizophrenia using rust and python

basically you have two groups of simulated neurons, one inhibitory and one excitatory. the excitatory group is connected so they will settle on one specific pattern. the inhibitory group is connected to the excitatory group semi-randomly. the excitatory group releases glutamate while the inhibitory group releases gaba. glutamate will cause the neurons to increase in voltage (or depolarize), gaba will cause the neurons to decrease in voltage (hyperpolarize).

heres a quick visualization of the results in manim

the y axis represents the average firing rate of the excitatory group over time, decay refers to how quickly glutamate is cleared from the neuronal synapse. there are two versions of the simulation, one where the excitatory group is presented with a cue, and one where it is not presented with a cue. when the cue is present, the excitatory group remembers the pattern and settles on it, represented by an increased firing rate. however, not every trial in the simulation leads to a memory recall, if the glutamate clearance happens too quickly, the memory is not maintained. on the other hand, when no cue is presented if glutamate clearance is too low, spontaneous activity overcomes inhibition and activity persists despite there being no input, ie a hallucination.

writing up some code in rust and python to replicate basic eeg activity using spiking neural networks

it uses a lattice of leaky integrate and fire models to act as biological neurons

unlike a classical neural network, this system has a sense of time

on the right you can see the voltage of the membrane potential of each neuron change over time

on the left you can see the concentration of signaling neurotransmitters in each neuronal synapse that contribute to how the membrane potential changes over time

extremely basic modeling but it looks neat

programmed a turing pattern generator in rust (using this as reference)

it's a cool way to simulate certain biochemical processes

i learned how to do basic multiprocessing with message passing, the basics of how tcp works, and how to write a terminal based ui (using https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui in case anyone is interested) just to see funky lines on my screen

(its slow because my laptop cannot handle obs if its life depended on it)

its just a simple terminal based app that just displays how much of the cpu a client is using and some basic ping statistics

me staring at my screen for 5 minutes waiting for rust to compile