Principles of Neural Design PDF
Preview Principles of Neural Design
Principles of Neural Design Principles Compute with chemistry Compute directly with analog primitives Combine analog and pulsatile processing Sparsify Send only what is needed Send at the lowest acceptable rate Minimize wire Make neural components irreducibly small Complicate Adapt, match, learn, and forget Principles of Neural Design Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2015 M assachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected]. This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sterling, Peter (Professor of neuroscience), author. Principles of neural design / Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin. p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02870-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) I. Laughlin, Simon, author. II. Title. [DNLM: 1. Brain— physiology. 2. Learning. 3. Neural Pathways. WL 300] QP376 612.8’2— dc23 2014031498 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Sally Zigmond and Barbara Laughlin Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii 1 What Engineers Know about Design 1 2 Why an Animal Needs a Brain 11 3 Why a Bigger Brain? 41 4 How Bigger Brains Are Organized 57 5 Information Processing: From Molecules to Molecular Circuits 105 6 Information Processing in Protein Circuits 125 7 Design of Neurons 155 8 How Photoreceptors Optimize the Capture of Visual Information 195 9 The Fly Lamina: An Efficient Interface for High-Speed Vision 235 10 Design of Neural Circuits: Recoding Analogue Signals to Pulsatile 265 11 Principles of Retinal Design 277 12 Beyond the Retina: Pathways to Perception and Action 323 13 Principles of Efficient Wiring 363 14 Learning as Design/Design of Learning 399 15 Summary and Conclusions 433 Principles of Neural Design 445 Notes 447 References 465 Index 519 Preface Neuroscience abounds with stories of intellectual and technical daring. Every peak has its Norgay and Hillary, and we had imagined telling some favorite stories of heroic feats, possibly set off in little boxes. Yet, this has been well done by others in various compendia and reminiscences (Straus- field, 2012; Glickstein, 2014; Kandel, 2006; Koch, 2012). Our main goal is to evince some principles of design and note some insights that follow. Stories deviating from this intention would have lengthened the book and distracted from our message, so we have resisted the natural temptation to memoir-ize. Existing compendia tend to credit various discoveries to particular individuals. This belongs to the storytelling. What interest would there be to the Trojan Wars without Odysseus and Agamemnon? On the other hand, dropping a name here and there distorts the history of the discovery process— where one name may stand for a generation of thought- ful and imaginative investigators. Consequently, in addition to forgoing stories, we forgo dropping names — except for a very few who early enunci- ated the core principles. Nor do the citations document who did what first; rather they indicate where supporting evidence will be found— o ften a review. Existing compendia often pause to explain the ancient origins of various terms, such as cerebellum or hippocampus. This might have been useful when most neuroscientists spoke a language based in Latin and Greek, but now with so many native speakers of Mandarin or Hindi the practice seems anachronistic, and we have dropped it. Certain terms may be unfamiliar to readers outside neuroscience, such as physicists and engineers. These are italicized at their first appearance to indicate that they are technical (c ation channel ). A reader unfamiliar with this term can learn by Googling in 210 ms that “ cation channels a re pore-forming proteins that help establish and con- trol the small voltage gradient across the plasma membrane of all living cells . . . ”
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