Reviews for From Computer to Brain: Foundations of Computational Neuroscience

The average rating for From Computer to Brain: Foundations of Computational Neuroscience based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-19 00:00:00 Igor Novak Overall this book was both surprisingly easy to read and immensely informative, not to mention humorous. The author comes across as someone you'd want to meet. However, there breakdowns, especially towards the end, for instance in describing analog electric models of neurons. I'll admit that the author needs to make trade-offs in the level of exposition, and that I like and have an easier time with discrete/digital modeling than analog things, but omitting calculus from the description probably only muddied the waters. The author uses an unfamiliar numerical approximation of the differential equations involved and then doesn't explain them enough, in my opinion. So I ended up skipping that section, and then the Hodgkin-Huxley model too, because I assume it builds on the same material. I ended up heading to the final two chapters and even then the way he described neural circuits seemed sort of hazy and rushed. The same could have been said of some of the other passages: for instance, some of the explanations about the factors involved in limulus modeling were perplexing. But don't get the impression that I'm just finding fault. I'm writing the review like this because saying all the good things about this book would take longer than saying all the bad things about it. A lot of the exposition is both clear and enthralling. It is shown that without compensation, lateral inhibition in the retina might lead to a bright halo around the whole field of vision; that the digestive tract will function in lieu of a brain, as if we have a simple worm living inside all of us; that a number of the brain's messaging systems are derived from our own cellular shit: "Are you thinking about your food, or is your food thinking about you?" On top of that I finally have a (somewhat) better understanding of the Hopfield neural network model and how it may have a kernel of biological plausibility. It just seems like the author, though brilliant, was pressured by a deadline. If a second edition comes out I'll look forward to it. Last word: I really do like the Computer Modern Roman typeface used in this book. It's an acquired taste; not anywhere near as refined as, say, Palatino; and is usually associated with much more painful reading but I have fond memories of it nonetheless.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-14 00:00:00 Hjbhjbhbb Vgjgjg The thing with me is that I don't get anything. Here's an example: I want to find out about viruses, so I track down the best book I can about viruses and I read it, and now if you ask me what a virus is I can say things. They hijack a cell's normal function so that it makes copies of the virus's DNA, instead of copies of their own DNA. Something like that. Amazing, I am so smart. But what if you ask me what a cell is? Or what DNA is? I can keep saying things - the cell is the factory of the human body, DNA is the blueprint for life - but I'm just saying things, dude. I'm a fucking parrot. Understanding a thing metaphorically is not the same as understanding the actual thing. I don't really, at a core level, know what I'm talking about, almost ever. metaphor So I know it's sortof a cliche to get all "the older I get the more I realize I don't know" or whatever it is old people say, and also it's untrue in my case because I didn't think I knew anything before either, but at a certain point you start to wonder, like, why am I even reading books. I guess it might help if I was at a party and chatting with a virologist and he wanted to say something interesting but there's a certain base level of knowledge I'd need in order to understand the more interesting thing? haha I don't go to parties and all my friends are unemployed graphic designers. Carl Zimmer is not that virologist who has something interesting to say. I wasn't all that into this book. Look, Siddhartha Mukherjee is the gold standard for talking about medical shit in an engaging and vaguely understandable way, right? Carl Zimmer's nowhere close. On the scale between textbook and Mukherjee, Zimmer's pretty low down. I was bored. Also he says to take zinc for a cold and I'm pretty sure that's bullshit. not totally clear on to what extent this is a metaphor He does, finally, at the end, talk about whether viruses count as "alive" or not, and I think that debate is super interesting. We've come up with a definition of "life," which like all definitions is sortof "decide what you think is alive and then describe that and there you are," so in other words it's bullshit, but anyway what it is is you have to be able to reproduce, and some other stuff, and viruses don't exactly reproduce, right? They make other peoples' cells do it for them. So does that count? What if viruses feel really bad about making us sick, and they keep having conferences to try to come up with ways to reproduce without making people sick, but maybe there's a contingent of like alt-right viruses who don't believe in sickness. This is the interesting part - saying we don't know shit about colds is not the interesting part - and there isn't enough of it. I also wanted to talk about rabies, because rabies is bananas, and he didn't. My thing with rabies is, it gets into your saliva, that makes sense, but then it makes you want to bite everyone so your saliva gets into them? That's so awesome! How does it do that? How did evolution come up with that? I don't know! I don't understand any of this!