Principles of Neural Design

Principles of Neural Design
Author: Peter Sterling
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2015-05-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262028700

Neuroscience research has exploded, with more than fifty thousand neuroscientists applying increasingly advanced methods. A mountain of new facts and mechanisms has emerged. And yet a principled framework to organize this knowledge has been missing. In this book, Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin, two leading neuroscientists, strive to fill this gap, outlining a set of organizing principles to explain the whys of neural design that allow the brain to compute so efficiently. Setting out to "reverse engineer" the brain -- disassembling it to understand it -- Sterling and Laughlin first consider why an animal should need a brain, tracing computational abilities from bacterium to protozoan to worm. They examine bigger brains and the advantages of "anticipatory regulation"; identify constraints on neural design and the need to "nanofy"; and demonstrate the routes to efficiency in an integrated molecular system, phototransduction. They show that the principles of neural design at finer scales and lower levels apply at larger scales and higher levels; describe neural wiring efficiency; and discuss learning as a principle of biological design that includes "save only what is needed." Sterling and Laughlin avoid speculation about how the brain might work and endeavor to make sense of what is already known. Their distinctive contribution is to gather a coherent set of basic rules and exemplify them across spatial and functional scales.

Principles of Neural Design

Principles of Neural Design
Author: Peter Sterling
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2017-06-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262534681

Two distinguished neuroscientists distil general principles from more than a century of scientific study, “reverse engineering” the brain to understand its design. Neuroscience research has exploded, with more than fifty thousand neuroscientists applying increasingly advanced methods. A mountain of new facts and mechanisms has emerged. And yet a principled framework to organize this knowledge has been missing. In this book, Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin, two leading neuroscientists, strive to fill this gap, outlining a set of organizing principles to explain the whys of neural design that allow the brain to compute so efficiently. Setting out to “reverse engineer” the brain—disassembling it to understand it—Sterling and Laughlin first consider why an animal should need a brain, tracing computational abilities from bacterium to protozoan to worm. They examine bigger brains and the advantages of “anticipatory regulation”; identify constraints on neural design and the need to “nanofy”; and demonstrate the routes to efficiency in an integrated molecular system, phototransduction. They show that the principles of neural design at finer scales and lower levels apply at larger scales and higher levels; describe neural wiring efficiency; and discuss learning as a principle of biological design that includes “save only what is needed.” Sterling and Laughlin avoid speculation about how the brain might work and endeavor to make sense of what is already known. Their distinctive contribution is to gather a coherent set of basic rules and exemplify them across spatial and functional scales.

Neural Network Design and the Complexity of Learning

Neural Network Design and the Complexity of Learning
Author: J. Stephen Judd
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1990
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780262100458

Using the tools of complexity theory, Stephen Judd develops a formal description of associative learning in connectionist networks. He rigorously exposes the computational difficulties in training neural networks and explores how certain design principles will or will not make the problems easier.Judd looks beyond the scope of any one particular learning rule, at a level above the details of neurons. There he finds new issues that arise when great numbers of neurons are employed and he offers fresh insights into design principles that could guide the construction of artificial and biological neural networks.The first part of the book describes the motivations and goals of the study and relates them to current scientific theory. It provides an overview of the major ideas, formulates the general learning problem with an eye to the computational complexity of the task, reviews current theory on learning, relates the book's model of learning to other models outside the connectionist paradigm, and sets out to examine scale-up issues in connectionist learning.Later chapters prove the intractability of the general case of memorizing in networks, elaborate on implications of this intractability and point out several corollaries applying to various special subcases. Judd refines the distinctive characteristics of the difficulties with families of shallow networks, addresses concerns about the ability of neural networks to generalize, and summarizes the results, implications, and possible extensions of the work. Neural Network Design and the Complexity of Learning is included in the Network Modeling and Connectionism series edited by Jeffrey Elman.

Introduction To The Theory Of Neural Computation

Introduction To The Theory Of Neural Computation
Author: John A. Hertz
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2018-03-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429968213

Comprehensive introduction to the neural network models currently under intensive study for computational applications. It also provides coverage of neural network applications in a variety of problems of both theoretical and practical interest.

What Is Health?

What Is Health?
Author: Peter Sterling
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262043300

An argument that health is optimal responsiveness and is often best treated at the system level. Medical education centers on the venerable “no-fault” concept of homeostasis, whereby local mechanisms impose constancy by correcting errors, and the brain serves mainly for emergencies. Yet, it turns out that most parameters are not constant; moreover, despite the importance of local mechanisms, the brain is definitely in charge. In this book, the eminent neuroscientist Peter Sterling describes a broader concept: allostasis (coined by Sterling and Joseph Eyer in the 1980s), whereby the brain anticipates needs and efficiently mobilizes supplies to prevent errors. Allostasis evolved early, Sterling explains, to optimize energy efficiency, relying heavily on brain circuits that deliver a brief reward for each positive surprise. Modern life so reduces the opportunities for surprise that we are driven to seek it in consumption: bigger burgers, more opioids, and innumerable activities that involve higher carbon emissions. The consequences include addiction, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and climate change. Sterling concludes that solutions must go beyond the merely technical to restore possibilities for daily small rewards and revivify the capacities for egalitarianism that were hard-wired into our nature. Sterling explains that allostasis offers what is not found in any medical textbook: principled definitions of health and disease: health as the capacity for adaptive variation and disease as shrinkage of that capacity. Sterling argues that since health is optimal responsiveness, many significant conditions are best treated at the system level.

Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience

Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience
Author: Eugene M. Izhikevich
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2010-01-22
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0262514206

Explains the relationship of electrophysiology, nonlinear dynamics, and the computational properties of neurons, with each concept presented in terms of both neuroscience and mathematics and illustrated using geometrical intuition. In order to model neuronal behavior or to interpret the results of modeling studies, neuroscientists must call upon methods of nonlinear dynamics. This book offers an introduction to nonlinear dynamical systems theory for researchers and graduate students in neuroscience. It also provides an overview of neuroscience for mathematicians who want to learn the basic facts of electrophysiology. Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience presents a systematic study of the relationship of electrophysiology, nonlinear dynamics, and computational properties of neurons. It emphasizes that information processing in the brain depends not only on the electrophysiological properties of neurons but also on their dynamical properties. The book introduces dynamical systems, starting with one- and two-dimensional Hodgkin-Huxley-type models and continuing to a description of bursting systems. Each chapter proceeds from the simple to the complex, and provides sample problems at the end. The book explains all necessary mathematical concepts using geometrical intuition; it includes many figures and few equations, making it especially suitable for non-mathematicians. Each concept is presented in terms of both neuroscience and mathematics, providing a link between the two disciplines. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory is at the core of computational neuroscience research, but it is not a standard part of the graduate neuroscience curriculum—or taught by math or physics department in a way that is suitable for students of biology. This book offers neuroscience students and researchers a comprehensive account of concepts and methods increasingly used in computational neuroscience. An additional chapter on synchronization, with more advanced material, can be found at the author's website, www.izhikevich.com.

Principles of Neural Science

Principles of Neural Science
Author: Eric R. Kandel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1646
Release: 2021
Genre: Neurology
ISBN: 9781264267682

The goal of this sixth edition of Principles of Neural Science is to provide readers with insight into how genes, molecules, neurons, and the circuits they form give rise to behavior. With the exponential growth in neuroscience research over the 40 years since the first edition of this book, an increasing challenge is to provide a comprehensive overview of the field while remaining true to the original goal of the first edition, which is to elevate imparting basic principles over detailed encyclopedic knowledge.

An Introductory Course in Computational Neuroscience

An Introductory Course in Computational Neuroscience
Author: Paul Miller
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262347563

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.

Principles of High-Performance Processor Design

Principles of High-Performance Processor Design
Author: Junichiro Makino
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2021-08-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030768716

This book describes how we can design and make efficient processors for high-performance computing, AI, and data science. Although there are many textbooks on the design of processors we do not have a widely accepted definition of the efficiency of a general-purpose computer architecture. Without a definition of the efficiency, it is difficult to make scientific approach to the processor design. In this book, a clear definition of efficiency is given and thus a scientific approach for processor design is made possible. In chapter 2, the history of the development of high-performance processor is overviewed, to discuss what quantity we can use to measure the efficiency of these processors. The proposed quantity is the ratio between the minimum possible energy consumption and the actual energy consumption for a given application using a given semiconductor technology. In chapter 3, whether or not this quantity can be used in practice is discussed, for many real-world applications. In chapter 4, general-purpose processors in the past and present are discussed from this viewpoint. In chapter 5, how we can actually design processors with near-optimal efficiencies is described, and in chapter 6 how we can program such processors. This book gives a new way to look at the field of the design of high-performance processors.