The brain underlies our ability to perceive, move, remember, think. This course will introduce students to the major systems of the brain, which underlie these abilities, focusing on sensory, motor and memory systems. The course will start with classical "textbook" concepts and methods in the field of Systems Neuroscience, but will then emphasize contemporary approaches, concepts and debates.
REMARK: As is the case for most of the Brain Sciences courses at Weizmann, the students in this course come from heterogeneous backgrounds, including biology, physics, computer science, psychology, and engineering. Some of the course material may be familiar to students who took neuroscience courses during their undergraduate studies ; but the more advanced material in this course will be well beyond the scope of typical undergraduate courses. We will provide book chapters as background reading, these chapters will serve as a refresher reading for those students that did learn some neuroscience in the past, and will be a must-read for those students who have no background at all in neuroscience (see more below). No special mathematical knowledge is required for this course.
Syllabus (week by week):
Overview of brain systems and general principles of their functional organization: From cortical maps and subcortical loops to the micro-structure of brain circuits and their interconnections. Brief introduction to Methodologies used to study brain systems (Ulanovsky)
Moving: Movement generation – Peripheral and central processes. (Paz)
Seeing: Peripheral visual processes. (Rivlin)
Seeing: Central visual processes. (Malach)
Smelling and tasting: Peripheral and central processes. (Sobel)
Hearing (and balance): Peripheral and central processes. (Ulanovsky)
Mechanisms of stimulus feature selectivity in sensory systems. (Lampl)
Touching: Peripheral and central processes. (Ahissar)
Active sensing: Closing motor-sensory loops. (Ahissar)
Looking and seeing: mind-body interactions between periphery, brainstem and cortex. (Barash)
Remembering: Overview of memory systems. (Dudai)
Learning: Basal ganglia. (Rivlin)
Learning: The cerebellum in motor learning and cognition. (Eyal Cohen)
Modulating: Neuromodulatory systems of the brain (Kawashima)
Integrating: The prefrontal cortex. (Yizhar)
Integrating: The hippocampus in spatial navigation and memory consolidation. (Ulanovsky)