• Britz Juliane

• Britz Juliane

This class provides a basic introduction to the field of neuroscience. In the first four lectures, the instructor will cover basic topics in neuroscience.

For the remaining lectures, the students will be paired up (to fully profit from the interdisciplinary background of students, ideally one student with a background in computer science and another student with a background in natural science) to present one of four selected chapters from the book “23 Problems in Systems Neuroscience” by van Hemmen and Sejnowski from Oxford University Press. This book identified the 23 basic problems in (systems) neuroscience that are thought to shape the field in the 21^st century, in analogy to the 23 Hilbert Problems in Mathematics to be tackled in the 20^th century. I will give a brief general introduction to the topic followed by the presentation by the students.

In the week following the presentation of the problem / chapter, they present paper that has tackled this problem and potentially provided an answer (or not).

In order to prepare for class and to actively contribute to a lively discussion, each student has to submit a question for each of the oral student presentations beforehand.

All information about the class can be found in the attached Syllabus. Please download it.

After the “Introduction to Neuroscience” class, students will have a fundamental notion about which problems are tackled how in modern neuroscience.

They will know

• how neurons communicate by chemical and electrical signals
• how the neural code can be decoded and reflect aspects of the external world
• the basic neuroanatomy of the human and animal brain
• the basic functioning of sensory and motor systems
• how experimental designs are investigated with electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods

In addition, they will be able to critically reflect on these problems by reviewing the literature to find studies that have tackled these problems.

They will be able to

• present selected chapters tackling a fundamental problem in systems neuroscience
• review the literature to find studies that have tackled this question and provided an answer (or not)
• actively contribute to the class discussion by formulating a question about each chapter and study presented