When I read (and wrote about) the recent controversy between Modha and Markram, I had this inescapable déjà vu feeling….weird, where did I hear that somebody already simulated a “brain” of the scale of the human brain? Of course!…. Eugene Izhikevich, a very bright (and VERY funny) neuroscientist that, in 2007, visited our center CELEST. During that visit, he showed what at that time (in 2005, and may be up to today) was one of the “largest scale” neural simulation. Read the rest of this entry »

In collaboration with Robert Thijs Kozma

Robert and I thought that it would be nice to finally define what the main building block of what we are talking about is! What are neurons, and how do they work? How do these relatively simple processing elements give rise to higher perceptual and cognitive functions? We are not going to answer these big questions in this post, but we have to start somewhere…. Let’s take a closer look at what is a neuron, how a simple mathematical model can capture a remarkable spectrum of neuron’s behavior, and let’s look at some simple MATLAB code that would allow neurdons to run a neuron in MATLAB at the end of this post. Read the rest of this entry »