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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