NEUR 415, Theoretical Neuroscience, Fall 2012


Attitude: "Teaching physiology without a mathematical description of the underlying dynamical processes is like teaching planetary motion to physicists without mentioning or using Kepler's laws; you can observe that there is a full moon every 28 days, but without Kepler's laws you cannot determine when the next total lunar or solar eclipse will be." (Keener & Sneyd)

Code for ALL figures and nondaggered exercises.

Lectures 1-15

Goal: Achieve a quantitative understanding of this cartoon. For a glimpse of the missing anatomical detail please view figure 2 in this paper and note that our cortex has 300,000,000 synapses per milligram!

Aug. 21 and 23: The Passive Isopotential Cell
     Assignment 1: Chapter 2, exercises 1-7. Due in class Tuesday, August 28.
     Assignment 2: Chapter 3, exercises 1, 2, 8, 10. Due in class Tuesday, September 4.

Aug. 28 and Aug. 30: The Active Isopotential Cell
     Outside Reading: Hodgkin and Huxley
     Assignment 3: Chapter 4, exercises 1-5 and for extra credit, 6. Due in class Tuesday, September 11.

Sep. 4 and 6: The Quasi-Active Isopotential Cell
     Assignment 4: Chapter 5 exercises 1-5, 11-12. Due in class Tuesday, September 18.

Sep. 11, 13 and 18: The Passive Cable
     Assignment 5: Chapter 6 exercises 1-6 and 10-12. Due in class Tuesday, September 25.

Sep. 20 and 25: The Passive Dendritic Tree
     Assignment 6: Chapter 8 exercises 1,2, and 4. Due in class Tuesday, October 2.

Sep. 27, Oct. 2, 4 and 9: The Active Dendritic Tree

Fall Recess: October 11-12

Lectures 16-28

Goal: To bridge between the biophysical properties of single nerve cells, as studied in Lectures 1-14, and the behavior of a whole organism.

Oct. 16, 18 and 23: Synaptic Transmission and Quantal Release
     Sections 1-7 of Chapter 11, and Chapter 12.
     Assignment 7: Chapter 11 exercises 2, 17 and Chapter 12, exercise 1. Due in class Thursday, October 25.

Oct. 25 and 30: Quantification of Spike Train Variability
     Sections 8-11 of Chapter 11, and Chapter 15.
     Assignment 8: Chapter 11 exercise 21 and Chapter 15 exercises 1-3. Due in class Thursday, November 1.

Nov. 1: Reduced Single Neuron Models
    Chapter 10.

Nov. 6: Fourier Series and Transforms
     Reading: Chapter 7.
     Assignment 9: Chapter 12 exercise 2, Chapter 15 exercise 4 and Chapter 7 exercises 5, 15-18. Due in class Thursday, November 8.

Nov. 8: Stochastic Processes
     Chapter 16.

Nov. 13: Natural Light Signals and Phototransduction
     Chapter 19.
     Assignment 10: Chapter 16 exercises 6, 16 and Chapter 19 exercise 1. Images available here. Due in class Thursday, November 15.

Nov. 15: Firing Rate Codes and Early Vision
     Chapter 20.

Nov. 20 and 27: Models of Simple and Complex Cells
     Chapter 21.
    Assignment 11: Final Projects and Presentations, in class Thursday, November 29.

Nov. 29: Relating Neural Responses and Psychophysics
     Sections 1-3 of Chapter 24, and Chapter 25.