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Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.
Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, computer simulations, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.
Spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) is a biological process that adjusts the strength of connections between neurons in the brain. The process adjusts the connection strengths based on the relative timing of a particular neuron's output and input action potentials. The STDP process partially explains the activity-dependent development of nervous systems, especially with regard to long-term potentiation and long-term depression.
A cortical minicolumn (also called cortical microcolumn) is a vertical column through the cortical layers of the brain. Neurons within the microcolumn "receive common inputs, have common outputs, are interconnected, and may well constitute a fundamental computational unit of the cerebral cortex". Minicolumns comprise perhaps 80–120 neurons, except in the primate primary visual cortex (V1), where there are typically more than twice the number. There are about 2×108 minicolumns in humans. From calculations, the diameter of a minicolumn is about 28–40 μm. Minicolumns grow from progenitor cells within the embryo and contain neurons within multiple layers (2–6) of the cortex.
A cortical column is a group of neurons forming a cylindrical structure through the cerebral cortex of the brain perpendicular to the cortical surface. The structure was first identified by Mountcastle in 1957. He later identified minicolumns as the basic units of the neocortex which were arranged into columns. Each contains the same types of neurons, connectivity, and firing properties. Columns are also called hypercolumn, macrocolumn, functional column or sometimes cortical module. Neurons within a minicolumn (microcolumn) encode similar features, whereas a hypercolumn "denotes a unit containing a full set of values for any given set of receptive field parameters". A cortical module is defined as either synonymous with a hypercolumn (Mountcastle) or as a tissue block of multiple overlapping hypercolumns.
Interneurons are neurons that connect to brain regions, i.e. not direct motor neurons or sensory neurons. Interneurons are the central nodes of neural circuits, enabling communication between sensory or motor neurons and the central nervous system (CNS). They play vital roles in reflexes, neuronal oscillations, and neurogenesis in the adult mammalian brain.
Neuroinformatics is the field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
The Blue Brain Project is a Swiss brain research initiative that aims to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Its mission is to use biologically-detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function.
Henry John Markram is a South African-born Israeli neuroscientist, professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and director of the Blue Brain Project and founder of the Human Brain Project.
Michelle Anne Mahowald was an American computational neuroscientist in the emerging field of neuromorphic engineering. In 1996 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame for her development of the Silicon Eye and other computational systems. She committed suicide at age 33.
The accommodation index is a statistic used in the neurosciences for describing spike train data. Many methods of experimental neuroscience, such as voltage clamp recordings, give their output in the form of measured voltages of individual neurons. Generally, the only important element of these voltage traces is the occurrence of spikes in the voltage, representing action potentials. It is often useful to be able to describe the data in terms of the spike timings; for instance, when optimizing a compartmental model towards observed behaviour, statistics such as this can be used to gauge error. Various statistics are used to do this, such as spike rate, average interspike interval, and the accommodation index.
Brain simulation is the concept of creating a functioning computer model of a brain or part of a brain. Brain simulation projects intend to contribute to a complete understanding of the brain, and eventually also assist the process of treating and diagnosing brain diseases.
Rishikesh Narayanan is an Indian neuroscientist, computer engineer and a professor at the Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU) of the Indian Institute of Science. He is the principal investigator at the Cellular Neurophysiology Laboratory of MBU where his team is engaged in researches on experimental and theoretical aspects of information processing in single neurons and their networks. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2016, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Gabriel Alejandro Silva is a theoretical and computational neuroscientist and bioengineer, Professor of Bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering and Professor of Neurosciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He is also the Founding Director of the Center for Engineered Natural Intelligence (CENI) at UCSD, and is a Jacobs Faculty Endowed Scholar in Engineering.
Kalanit Grill-Spector is a professor of Psychology at Stanford University and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. She is best known for developing fMRI adaptation, a technique useful for studying the sensitivity of neurons in the brain to changes of a stimulus.
Tim P. Vogels is a professor of theoretical neuroscience and research leader at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. He is primarily known for his scholarly contributions to the study of neuronal plasticity related to learning and memory in the brain.
Michal Rivlin is a Senior Scientist and Sara Lee Schupf Family Chair in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She was awarded the 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists for her research on the neuronal circuitry of the retina.
Adrienne Fairhall is a University Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and an adjunct Professor in the Departments of Physics and Applied Mathematics, as well as the director of the Computational Neuroscience Program and co-director of the Institute for Neuroengineering at the University of Washington.
Ila Fiete is an Indian-American physicist and computational neuroscientist as well as a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences within the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fiete builds theoretical models and analyses neural data and to uncover how neural circuits perform computations and how the brain represents and manipulates information involved in memory and reasoning.
Wulfram Gerstner is a German and Swiss computational neuroscientist. His research focuses on neural spiking patterns in neural networks, and their connection to learning, spatial representation and navigation. Since 2006 Gerstner has been a full professor of Computer Science and Life Sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he also serves as a Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience.
References
- ↑ "Theoretical Neuroscientist Misha Tsodyks Joins Faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study | IAS". ias.edu. 18 June 2019. Retrieved 2020-01-27.
- ↑ "Misha Tsodyks IAS Profile |". ias.edu. 9 December 2019. Retrieved 2020-01-26.
- ↑ "Misha Tsodyks | Faculty 1000". f1000.com. Retrieved 2020-01-27.
- ↑ "Misha Tsodyks | Frontiers". frontiersin.org. Retrieved 2020-01-27.
- ↑ "Misha Tsodyks IAS Profile |". ias.edu. 9 December 2019. Retrieved 2020-01-26.
