A survey of the field of methematical biology, including dominance of the slow manifolds.
A discussion of aspects of brainstem anatomy and physiology pertinent to behavior.
Class work is supplemented by extensive lab work where students learn techniques such
as electroencephalographic recording from freely moving animals, horseradish peroxidase (HRP)
injection and staining and mounting of tissue for light microscopy.
ISC 6440
This course covers the basics of computational neuroscience and introduces many research topics of
both biological and artificial neural networks.
ISC 6460
This course will give students in depth understanding of the methods of computational neuroscience and
hands-on experience of such research and will enable them to use some of the mehods in their own thesis research.
ISC 6461
ISC 6452
Developmental Neurobiology
This course is designed for Graduate and Senior Undergraduate students who have had some Psychobiology,
Cellular Biology or Physiology ad now want to learn more about the development of the Brain and Nervous System.
The topics covered begin in early embryogenesis and follow the development of the nervous system
at the cellular and molecular level through to the development of behavior.
Students are strongly encouraged to talk with the instructor before registering and will
need to have some biological background such as Biological Bases of Behavior (PSB 4002),
Anatomy and Physiology (APB 2085/6) or Cell Biology (PCB 4523) or similar.
PSB 5515
Fractals and Chaos have attracted wide attention and excitement in mathematics and the physical sciences.
These ideas are now being used to acheive a better understanding of DNA, proteins, ion channels, nerve cells,
muscle cells, blood vessels, the heart, the lungs, and the brain. This course will explain the properties of
Fractals and Chaos and illustrate them with biomedical applications. Mathematical level: elementary calculus.
ISC 5451
This course will examine the perception and cognition of music from a psychological viewpoint. Topics include: Auditory Perception, Consonance and Dissonance, Musical Scales, Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm. We will also address relationships between music and language, the communication of emotion and meaning, and neurological and clinical findings. The first weeks of the course will consist of a survey of the field of music perception and cognition. We will then read classic papers representing work in experimental psychology, music theory, and neural networks.
Noninvasive Brain Recording Techniques and TechnologyA sound introduction to the imaging technologies used at the CCSBS and their application in research.
Discussed in details are EEG, MEG, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and functional MRI
starting at the underlying physical processes of electric and magnetic fields and material properties.
The material covers spin dynamics and pulse sequences, and their relation to MR contrast with an emphasis
on echo planar sequences, the basis of fMRI recordings (including an afternoon of scanning of a phantom).
The nature of the EEG and MEG signals are discussed and advanced analysis methods for spatiotemporal
patterns are applied to them. Prerequisite: Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.
ISC 6467
A study of neural function, cortical electrogenesis, and theories of origin of the EEG,
covering practical issues relating to EEG recording and basic methods of EEG analysis.
Autocovariance, cross-covariance, Fourier analysis, autoregressive modeling, and digital
filtering are some of the techniques covered.
ISC 6466
An introduction to Synergetics, the theory of self-organizing structures, will be given along examples
from biology, chemistry and physics. Deterministic and stochastic models will be studied,
e.g. Laser equations, Navier-Stokes model, Ginzburg-Landau systems, Fokker-Planck theory,
master equation. Prerequisite: Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.
ISC 6464
The perception and production of speech are studied, beginning with fundamentals of
speech acoustics and physiology and including memory, perception, and the evolution of language systems.
Other aspects explored include real-time language processing mechanisms; language acquisition;
language after brain damage; language in other species; language in nonverbal domains (sign language; parsing by computers).
PSB 6809
The dynamics of neural activity will be studied on different levels of organization such as single cells, pairs of neurons and large-scale continuum models. These models shall be compared in the light of traversing from one organizational scale to another. Prerequisite: Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos.
