What Is Computational Neurobiology?
Neurobiology is the study of the nervous system. Until recently, most neurobiology research centered around exposing different neural tissue preparations to a wide range of environmental stimuli and seeing how they responded. More recently, the growing field of computational neurobiology has involved constructing models of how we think the nervous system works [Segev:89a], [Wehmeier:89a], [Yamada:89a]. These models are then exposed to a wide range of experimental conditions and their responses compared to the real neural systems. Those models that are demonstrated to accurately and reliably mimic the behavior of real neural systems are then used to predict the neural system’s response to new and untried experimental situations, and to make firm predictions about how the neural system should respond if our theory of neural functioning is correct. Simplified models are also used to determine which features of a real neural system are critical to its underlying behavior and function. In d
