EAN: 9780262534680

PRINCIPLES OF NEURAL DESIGN - PETER STERLING SI...

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.

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