Name: Models of the Mind
Rating: 4.5 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9781472966438

Grace Lindsay

Explores the value of describing the machinery of neuroscience using the elegant language of mathematics and reveals in full the remarkable fruits of this endeavour.

How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain

Models of the Mind

Eneko Uruñuela

Philip Warren Anderson, an American physicist who won a Nobel Prize working on such phenomena, wrote in a now-famous essay entitled 'More is different' that 'the behaviour of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles'. That is, the collective action of many small particles - organised only through their local interactions can produce a function not directly possible in any of them alone. Physicists have formalised these interactions as equations and successfully used them to explain the behaviour of metals, gases and ice. In the late 1970s, a colleague of Anderson's, John J. Hopfield, saw in these in these mathematical models of magnetism a structure akin to that of the brain. Hopfield used this insight to bring under mathematical control a long-lasting mystery: the question of how neurons make and maintain memories.

Parkinson's disease is a disorder that impacts the firing of neurons in the basal ganglia. Located deep in the brain, the basal ganglia are composed of a variety of regions with elaborate Latin names. When the input to one region the striatum is perturbed by Parkinson's disease, it knocks the rest of the basal ganglia off balance. As a result of changes to the striatum, the subthalamic nucleus (another region of the basal ganglia) starts to fire more, which causes neurons in the globus pallidus external (yet another basal ganglia region) to fire. But those neurons send connections back to the subthalamic nucleus that prevent those neurons from firing more - which also, in turn, shuts down the globus pallidus external itself.

Grace Lindsay reveals the value of describing the machinery of neuroscience using the elegant language of mathematics. The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For over a century, a diverse array of researchers have been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate – and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it. In Models of the Mind, author and computational neuroscientist Grace Lindsay explains how mathematical models have allowed scientists to understand and describe many of the brain's processes, including decision-making, sensory processing, quantifying memory, and more. She introduces readers to the most important concepts in modern neuroscience, and highlights the tensions that arise when bringing the abstract world of mathematical modelling into contact with the messy details of biology. Each chapter focuses on mathematical tools that have been applied in a particular area of neuroscience, progressing from the simplest building block of the brain – the individual neuron – through to circuits of interacting neurons, whole brain areas and even the behaviors that brains command. Throughout Grace will look at the history of the field, starting with experiments done on neurons in frog legs at the turn of the twentieth century and building to the large models of artificial neural networks that form the basis of modern artificial intelligence. She demonstrates the value of describing the machinery of neuroscience using the elegant language of mathematics, and reveals in full the remarkable fruits of this endeavor.

Great review of computational neuroscience. Learned a lot about the history that I didn't know before.

Models of the Mind How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain

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