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!
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)
Aug. 26 and 28, The Passive Isopotential Cell, D&A Chapter 5.
Matlab code: feps.m and beps.m
Assignment 1: Class notes, Chapter 1 and 2, all exercises, due in
class Thursday, September 4.
Sep. 2 and 4, The Active Isopotential Cell
, D&A Chapter 5.
Outside Reading: Hodgkin and Huxley
Matlab code: Slow Demo heas.m and
Fast spike counter heas_sp.m
Assignment 2: Class notes, Chapter 3, all
exercises, due in class Thursday, September 11.
Sep. 9 and 11, The Quasi-Active Isopotential Cell
, D&A Chapter 5.
Matlab code: heasper.m
hhsym0.m
Assignment 3: Class notes, Chapter 4, all
exercises, due in class Tuesday, September 23.
Sep. 16 and 18, The Passive Fiber
, D&A Chapter 6.
Matlab code: evec.m
bepfib.m
Assignment 4: Class notes, Chapter 5, all
exercises, due in class Thursday, October 2.
Sep. 23, 25 and 30, The Passive Dendritic Tree
, D&A Chapter 6.
Matlab code: bevec.m
befork.m
Assignment 5: Class notes, Chapter 6, all
exercises, due 5pm Wed Oct 15.
Oct. 2, 7 and 9, The Active Spiny Tree
, D&A Chapter 6.
Matlab code: heafib.m
hefork.m
heafibA.m
heafibAampa2.m
heafibAampa2nmda.m
Assignment 6: Class notes, Chapter 7, all
exercises, due in class XXX
Oct. 23 and 28, Spontaneous activity and quantification of neuronal variability
Oct. 30 and Nov. 4, Integration of synaptic inputs in dendritic trees
Nov. 6 and 11, Simplified models of neuronal activity
Nov. 13 and 18, Encoding of stimuli by instantaneous firing rate
Nov. 20 and 25, Models of V1 simple and complex cells
Thanksgiving Recess: November 27-28
Dec. 2, Reverse-correlation methods for receptive field estimation
Dec. 4, Correlating spikes with behavior