This laboratory aims at understanding the core concepts of cellular and circuit signals in neuroscience, covering neuron anatomy, physiology, synaptic transmission, and neural coding. It is also aimed to provide practical skills essential to understand the principles of neural bases of multi-scale information from mechanisms of single neurons and synapses to functional microcircuits with specific connectivity and plasticity, till the generation of high-level function behaviors. In particular, acquiring experience with several recording techniques and analyzing brain data with standard pipelines as well as novel AI methods will provide a hint on how neural data are collected, analyzed, and interpreted to investigate brain function.  

List of topics:

Cellular and circuit signals

  • Introduction (anatomy and physiology of neurons, neural circuits, neural firing, synaptic transmission and plasticity, and neural coding)
  • Recording techniques for cells and circuits (electrophysiology, single-unit recordings, multi-electrode arrays, and patch-clamp recording, imaging techniques)
  • Data analysis methods, and applications to AI. Some examples will deal especially with the cerebellum circuit.

Ensemble brain signals

  • Introduction
  • Recording techniques
  • Analysis methods
  • Example analyses of human fMRI recordings.

Brain-inspired systems

  • Bringing together artificial intelligence and neuroscience
  • Intro to Neuro-AI and related methods
  • Machine learning applied to neural data (hands-on)
  • Examples of brain-inspired technologies.