The goal of this class is for students to explore various topics in neuroscience that give one a sense of the possible framework of computation through electrical signaling by wet, messy, living systems. The introduction to neuroscience course should have already given you all a sense of how single neurons perform basic computations of addition and subtraction and how elementary circuits might perform more complicated computations. We will explore how these multi neuron circuits work in this course not through textbook material or conventional teaching, but rather through reading primary scientific material, with which you should already be familiar.
In this class, we will put together a series of topics in neuroscience for further study. A rough set of topics is provided in the syllabus, but we can explore really any other system that people are interested in. In every week, one class will involve teaching, and the other will involve discussion and presentations. In the second class, students take turns contributing to the collective understanding of the field by presenting individually selected readings, based on your own interest. Then we will collectively discuss advances in each field, relying on looking up fresh primary research papers together.
bittu@ashoka.edu.in