Books in the Computational Neuroscience Series series

Churchland and Sejnowski address the foundational ideas of the emerging field of computational neuroscience, examine a diverse range of neural network models, and consider future directions of the field.

A textbook for students with limited background in mathematics and computer coding, emphasizing computer tutorials that guide readers in producing models of neural behavior.This introductory text teaches students to understand, simulate, and analyze the complex behaviors of individual neurons and brain circuits. It is built around computer tutorials that guide students in producing models of neural behavior, with the associated Matlab code freely available online. From these models students learn how individual neurons function and how, when connected, neurons cooperate in a circuit. The book demonstrates through simulated models how oscillations, multistability, post-stimulus rebounds, and chaos can arise within either single neurons or circuits, and it explores their roles in the brain. The book first presents essential background in neuroscience, physics, mathematics, and Matlab, with explanations illustrated by many example problems. Subsequent chapters cover the neuron and spike production; single spike trains and the underlying cognitive processes; conductance-based models; the simulation of synaptic connections; firing-rate models of large-scale circuit operation; dynamical systems and their components; synaptic plasticity; and techniques for analysis of neuron population datasets, including principal components analysis, hidden Markov modeling, and Bayesian decoding. Accessible to undergraduates in life sciences with limited background in mathematics and computer coding, the book can be used in a "flipped” or "inverted” teaching approach, with class time devoted to hands-on work on the computer tutorials. It can also be a resource for graduate students in the life sciences who wish to gain computing skills and a deeper knowledge of neural function and neural circuits.

The complexity of the brain and the protean nature of behaviour remain the most elusive area of science, but also the most important. Written by 23 experts from many areas of systems neuroscience, this book provides a useful roadmap to the field of systems neuroscience, and aims to serve as a source of inspiration for explorers of the brain.

Using experimental and theoretical findings from cellular biophysics, this book explains the computational functions of single neurons. The topics include the linear cable equation; cable theory as applied to passive dendritic trees and dendritic spines; and chemical and electrical synapses and how to treat them from a computational point of view.

This book is concerned with sensory cue integration both within and between sensory modalities, and focuses on the emerging way of thinking about cue combination in terms of uncertainty. The probabilistic approaches elaborated in Sensory Cue Integration aim to formalize the uncertainty of cues. They describe cue combination as the nervous system's attempt to minimize uncertainty in its estimates and to choose successful actions.

A mathematical framework that describes learning of invariant representations in the ventral stream, offering both theoretical development and applications.