Much research focuses on the question of how information is processed in nervoussystems, from the level of individual ionic channels to large-scale neuronal networks, and from"simple" animals such as sea slugs and flies to cats and primates. New interdisciplinarymethodologies combine a bottom-up experimental methodology with the more top-down-drivencomputational and modeling approach. This book serves as a handbook of computational methods andtechniques for modeling the functional properties of single and groups of nerve cells.Thecontributors highlight several key trends: (1) the tightening link between analytical/numericalmodels and the associated experimental data, (2) the broadening of modeling methods, at both thesubcellular level and the level of large neuronal networks that incorporate real biophysicalproperties of neurons as well as the statistical properties of spike trains, and (3) theorganization of the data gained by physical emulation of the nervous system components through theuse of very large scale circuit integration (VLSI) technology.The field of neuroscience has growndramatically since the first edition of this book was published nine years ago. Half of the chaptersof the second edition are completely new; the remaining ones have all been thoroughly revised. Manychapters provide an opportunity for interactive tutorials and simulation programs. They can beaccessed via Christof Koch's Website.Contributors : Larry F. Abbott, Paul R. Adams, HagaiAgmon-Snir, James M. Bower, Robert E. Burke, Erik de Schutter, Alain Destexhe, Rodney Douglas, BardErmentrout, Fabrizio Gabbiani, David Hansel, Michael Hines, Christof Koch, Misha Mahowald, ZacharyF. Mainen, Eve Marder, Michael V. Mascagni, Alexander D. Protopapas, Wilfrid Rall, John Rinzel, IdanSegev, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Shihab Shamma, Arthur S. Sherman, Paul Smolen, Haim Sompolinsky,Michael Vanier, Walter M. Yamada.
Christof Koch is Professor in the Divisions of Biology and of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology. Idan Segev is Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and the Center for Neural Computation at Hebrew University.