BLU 621E - Computational Neuroscience

Course Objectives

1. To introduce the main elements of the nervous system from molecular scale to the scale of the organism in terms of structure and function.
2. Explanation of the biophysics of electrical events in the nervous system and their mathematical modeling.
3. Data collection with brain-computer-interfaces and analysis of the collected data by statistical signal processing methods.
4. Likelihood-based models of neural activity and their use in neural decoding.

Course Description

Central and peripheral nervous systems and their substructures. Sensory systems. Anatomy and physiology of neurons and glia. Nernst and Goldman Equations. Electrical equivalent circuit of the cell membrane. Hodgkin-Huxley Equations. Brain-computer interfaces. Recording techniques. Spike sorting. Spike train analysis using point-process Generalized Linear Models. Spike train decoding.