Overview

Our perception of the world is driven by sensory input which is sent to our brains through sequences of spikes carried by sensory neurons, an incoming/outgoing ""language of the brain"". This book explores the way in which the nervous system represents or encodes these sensory signals, asking in particular whether a linguistic analogy makes sense, whether as in language, there are notions of context that can influence the meaning of the individual words, and whether these questions can be given precise formulations in the design and analysis of experiments on neurons. The authors invite the reader to play the role of a homunculus, a hypothetical observer inside the brain who makes decisions based on the incoming spike trains. This perspective differs from the more traditional ones in two respects: rather than asking how a neuron responds to a given stimulus, the authors ask how the brain could make inferences about an unknown stimulus from a given neural response. The flavour of some problems faced by the organism is captured by analyzing the way in which the observer can make a running reconstruction of the sensory stimulus as it evolves in time. These ideas are illustrated by examples from experiments on many biological systems. Intended for neurobiologists with an interest in mathematical analysis of neural data as well as the growing number of physicists and mathematicians interested in information processing by ""real"" nervous systems, ""Spikes"" provides a self-contained review of relevant concepts in information theory and statistical decision theory. A quantitative framework is used to pose precise questions about the structure of the neural code and these questions in turn influence both the design of experiments and the data analysis.

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9780262681087

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Reviews

A joy to read... This book will undoubtedly become a classic. Theideas presented in it have already begun (in no small part through thework of the authors) to reshape our views of the neural code. Thisbook will make them accessible to a much wider audience. Anthony Zador , Science Spikes is a really wonderful book. The particulartheory about how the brain works that informs the presentation, and thusdetermines how neural coding is to be described, is clearly thought throughand the arguments are attractively and intelligently presented. Charles F. Stevens, The Salk Institute

A joy to read... This book will undoubtedly become a classic. The ideas presented in it have already begun (in no small part through the work of the authors) to reshape our views of the neural code. This book will make them accessible to a much wider audience. --Anthony Zador, Science

A joy to read...This book will undoubtedly become a classic. The ideas presented in it have already begun (in no small part through the work of the authors) to reshape our views of the neural code. This book will make them accessible to a much wider audience. -- Anthony Zador Science

A joy to read...This book will undoubtedly become a classic. The ideas presented in it have already begun (in no small part through the work of the authors) to reshape our views of the neural code. This book will make them accessible to a much wider audience. -- Anthony Zador * Science *

Author Information

Terrence J. Sejnowski holds the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego. He was a member of the advisory committee for the Obama administration's BRAIN initiative and is President of the Neural Information Processing (NIPS) Foundation. He has published twelve books, including (with Patricia Churchland) The Computational Brain (25th Anniversary Edition, MIT Press). Tomaso A. Poggio is Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he is also Director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and Codirector of the Center for Biological and Computational Learning. He is coeditor of Perceptual Learning (MIT Press).

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