BRIAN simulator

Substitution occurs in difficult judgments for which there is no direct access to the target attribute to be evaluated. This is typically the case of permanently hiring a young scientist: one wants to know whether the scientist will have a successful career, but the outcome is uncertain and especially difficult to assess if you [...]

When a university or research institution wants to hire a professor or other permanent academic position (e.g. full-time research scientist in CNRS in France), a committee is appointed (or elected) to decide who to hire. From my experience as a candidate and as a member of such committees, the way committees work is very [...]

Computational neuroscience is the science of how the brain “computes”: how it recognizes faces or identifies words in speech. In computational neuroscience, standard approaches to perception are representational: they describe how neural networks ... [More] represent in their firing some aspect of the external world. This means that a particular pattern of activity is associated to a [...] [Less]

We are proud to announce the alpha release of Brian2, the successor of Brian, everyone’s favourite neural simulator. This is an alpha release, therefore many features are still missing and there are very likely many bugs. The main reason for this release is to get feedback from users, the only way to make sure that [...]

Computational neuroscience is the field that aims at explaining the neural mechanisms that underlie cognitive abilities, by developing quantitative models of neural mechanisms that are able to display these cognitive abilities. It can be seen as the ... [More] “synthetic” approach to neuroscience. On one hand, it is widely believed that a better understanding of “how the [...] [Less]

An explanation can often be expressed as the answer to a question starting with “why”. For example: why do neurons generate action potentials? There are different kinds of explanations. More than 2000 years ago, Aristotle categorized them as “four ... [More] causes”: efficient cause, material cause, formal cause and final cause. They correspond respectively to origin, substrate, [...] [Less]

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”. This quote is attributed to Richard Feynman, one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century. Many other famous scientists, including Einstein, held the ... [More] opposite view, but nonetheless it is true that many excellent scientists have very little esteem for [...] [Less]

When one thinks of sounds, the image that comes to mind is a speaker playing back a sound wave, which travels through air to the ears of the listener. But not all sounds are like that. I will give two examples: head scratching and footsteps. When you scratch your head, a sound is produced that [...]

Perception is traditionally categorized into five senses: hearing, vision, touch, taste and olfaction. These categories seem to reflect the organs of sense, rather than the sensory modalities themselves. For example, the sense of taste is generally ... [More] (in the neuroscience literature) associated with the taste receptors in the tongue (sweet, salty etc). But what we refer [...] [Less]

I would like to propose another way to describe the epistemological relationships between computational and experimental neuroscience. In acoustics, there is a methodology known as “analysis-synthesis” of sounds (Risset & Wessel, 1982) to ... [More] understand what makes the quality (or “timbre”) of a sound (see in particular Gaver (1993), “How do we hear in the world?”). [...] [Less]