Computational Neuroscience

a 400-level discussion/capstone course at William & Mary

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    • Syllabus
    • Calendar – Spring 2025
  • Foundations
    • A kind of impalpability to this whole business
    • Is the brain a computer?
    • What’s it like to be a bat?
    • The problem of qualia
    • Philosophy and our mental life
    • Information, representation, and physical computation
    • Marr’s three levels of inquiry
  • Neural Computations
    • Neural integrators (e.g., the vestibulo-ocular reflex and head direction cells)
    • Line attractor networks (or how the brain keeps the eyes still)
    • Temporal information processing (e.g., interaural time difference coding and sound localization)
    • Evolutionary trends in directional hearing
    • Feature detectors – What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain
    • The recent excitement about neural networks
    • Object Recognition
    • Hebbian synapses and spike-timing-dependent plasticity
    • Hippocampal place cells
    • Olfactory coding
    • Olfactory network dynamics
    • Synaptic scaling and synaptic computation
    • Cephalopod brains and behavior
    • Synaptic Learning Rules – Cerebellum
    • Basal ganglia and action selection
    • Biosonar
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  • Themes
    • Language is not learned – linguistics turned computational with Chomsky
    • The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
    • The evolution of language systems in the human brain
    • Chomsky without language: Are there perceptual-cognitive universals?
    • Theory of mind
    • History of AI and story understanding
    • Consciousness without cortex
    • Evolution of human cognition
    • Social Intelligence
    • Thought beyond words
  • Projects
    • Spring 2025
      • Spring 2025 Final Project Statement
    • Spring 2023
      • Spring 2023 – Midterm Project
    • Spring 2020
      • Spring 2020 Midterm Project Statement
      • Spring 2020 Midterm Projects – Peer-to-peer discussion
      • Spring 2020 Final Project Statement
      • Spring 2020 Final Projects
    • Spring 2018
      • Example Midterm Projects
      • Example Term Projects
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Slides from today, preparation for Thursday

January 28, 2025 / Greg@WM

As promised, here are the “Is your brain a computer?” lecture slides

IsTheBrainAComputerDownload

Your assignment to prepare for Thursday’s discussion can be found on the page What is it like to be a bat?

–Greg

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