Principles of Neural Design

Two distinguished neuroscientists distil general principles from more than a century of scientific study, “reverse engineering” the brain to understand its design.

Neuroscience research has exploded, with more than fifty thousand neuroscientists applying increasingly advanced methods. A mountain of new facts and mechanisms has emerged. And yet a principled framework to organize this knowledge has been missing. In this book, Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin, two leading neuroscientists, strive to fill this gap, outlining a set of organizing principles to explain the whys of neural design that allow the brain to compute so efficiently.

Setting out to “reverse engineer” the brain—disassembling it to understand it—Sterling and Laughlin first consider why an animal should need a brain, tracing computational abilities from bacterium to protozoan to worm. They examine bigger brains and the advantages of “anticipatory regulation”; identify constraints on neural design and the need to “nanofy”; and demonstrate the routes to efficiency in an integrated molecular system, phototransduction. They show that the principles of neural design at finer scales and lower levels apply at larger scales and higher levels; describe neural wiring efficiency; and discuss learning as a principle of biological design that includes “save only what is needed.”

Sterling and Laughlin avoid speculation about how the brain might work and endeavor to make sense of what is already known. Their distinctive contribution is to gather a coherent set of basic rules and exemplify them across spatial and functional scales.

Contents

1 What Engineers Know about Design

2 Why an Animal Needs a Brain

3 Why a Bigger Brain?

4 How Bigger Brains Are Organized

5 Information Processing: From Molecules to Molecular Circuits

6 Information Processing in Protein Circuits

7 Design of Neurons

8 How Photoreceptors Optimize the Capture of Visual Information

9 The Fly Lamina: An Efficient Interface for High-Speed Vision

10 Design of Neural Circuits: Recoding Analogue Signals to Pulsatile

11 Principles of Retinal Design

12 Beyond the Retina: Pathways to Perception and Action

13 Principles of Efficient Wiring

14 Learning as Design/Design of Learning

15 Summary and Conclusions

Review

The authors have been thinking deeply about the issues discussed and it shows, the neurobiology is right up-to-date, and the writing is artful, clear, and engaging. This book is a wonderful start for what will, I believe, become the standard way for conceptualizing neurobiology.—Charles F. Stevens, Current Biology—

Drawing on their areas of expertise, Sterling and Laughlin have written a beautiful book addressing some simple questions about how the brain works, enriching the reader with many ‘aha’ moments. This transformative book brings us closer to understanding the logic that nature could be using in its design of neural circuits. And, in fact, perhaps the biggest impression from reading the book is a renewed awe for the incredible work that nature has done with nervous systems, which must be the crowning achievement of evolution. I cannot wait to use it as textbook in my course on neural circuits.

―Rafael Yuste, Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University

About the Authors

Peter Sterling is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is the coauthor (with Simon Laughlin) of Principles of Neural Design (MIT Press).

Simon Laughlin is Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society.