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Big ideas: Focus on computation
Matteo Carandini has an editorial in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience arguing that we should focus energy on studying neural computation. In this context, neural computation is understood as an intermediate level of complexity between low-level neural circuits and high-level behavior. He argues that trying to go from physical descriptions of circuits to large-scale
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Following the scientific literature through RSS
I subscribe to multiple RSS feeds from journals. Whenever I feel the urge to procrastinate (e.g. Facebook/9gag), I open up my Google Reader instead, read some abstracts and print some interesting papers. It’s an easy way to keep up to date on the scientific literature by piggybacking on one’s natural propensity to dick around. Ulitsky
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Normalization as a canonical neural computation
There’s an excellent review on normalization in the January 2012 edition of Nature Reviews Neuroscience by Carandini and Heeger. The theory and mathematics of normalization have stayed consistent since the seminal papers Heeger (1992) and Carandini and Heeger (1994). The response of a given neuron is divided by the summed output of a normalization pool,
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Spikes trigger LFP waves: the rebuttal
Nauhaus, Busse, Carandini and Dario Ringach published an influential paper in 2009 with pretty convincing evidence that spikes trigger traveling waves of activity visible in LFPs; that these waves travel laterally; and because the dynamics of these waves change during stimulation compared to spontaneous activity, that stimulation modulates functional connectivity. This could imply that a
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Extracting data from published graphs in Matlab
Have you ever needed to grab data from a published graph, perhaps to reanalyze the results? The grabit function, available on Matlab Central, does exactly this. It’s a GUI that allows the user to specify the location of axes, and then grab data by clicking on the data points. Learned about it in the Methods
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Journal club express #1
I’m introducing a new (hopefully recurring) feature on the blog: the Journal Club express. Lengthy discussions of papers are quite time-consuming to write, so instead I’ll periodically highlight a few recent papers I’ve read that I think could be interesting to regular readers. There’s a new Neuron paper from John Maunsell’s lab that shows an
xcorr: AI & neuro 