Introducing Computation to Neuroscience Selected Papers of George Gerstein

This book brings together a selection of papers by George Gerstein, representing his long-term endeavor of making neuroscience into a more rigorous science inspired by physics, where he had his roots. Professor Gerstein was many years ahead of the ?eld, consistently striving for quantitative analyses, mechanistic models, and conceptual clarity.  In doing so, he pioneered Computational Neuroscience, many years before the term itself was born.  The overarching goal of George Gerstein’s research was to understand the functional organization of neuronal networks in the brain. The editors of this book have compiled a selection of George Gerstein’s many seminal contributions to neuroscience--be they experimental, theoretical or computational--into a single, comprehensive volume .The aim is to provide readers with a fresh introduction of these various concepts in the original literature.  The volume is organized  in a series of chapters by subject, ordered in time, each one containing one or more of George Gerstein’s papers.

Preface

1. Integrate and fire: RC circuits to model neurons and reward

monkeys

2. Neuronal spike trains, stochastic point processes, and why George Gerstein’s papers are still worth reading

3. Visual Functions of Inferior Temporal Cortex

4. Early Days in the Gerstein Lab: Neuronal Plasticity in 1, 2, and 3 Dimensions

5. Patterns in Spike Trains

6. Introduction to the Gravity Papers

7. On correlations and interactions between neurons and with George Gerstein

8. Significance of Correlations between Spike Trains

9. Spatial-Temporal Spike Patterns

10. Does Cross Correlation Have a Unique Interpretation?

11. Neuronal Plasticity and my Experience Working with George L. Gerstein

12. Auditory Experiments and Modeling

13. Thinking about Analysis Methods with George in Philadelphia, Cambridge and Newcastle

14. Higher-order Correlations and Synfire Chains

Nencki Award for George L. Gerstein

Epilogue

Publications of George L. Gerstein

Ad Aertsen is Professor of Neurobiology and Biophysics, Bernstein Center Freiburg, University of Freiburg