Work in progress · 1 of 11 chapters
Neuroscience Book
For AI Engineers
The building blocks discovered by neuroscience — the brain's parts, cells, signals, circuits, and learning rules — distilled for engineers who build intelligent systems.
About this book
Neuroscience Book presents the building blocks that neuroscience has discovered — the parts, cells, signals, circuits, and learning rules of the brain — that may be needed to build intelligent systems. It is written for people who work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and software engineering: a summary of neuroscience for engineers.
It does not propose a grand theory of intelligence. Its job is to explain how the nervous system works, as precisely and as briefly as possible; deciding which of these ideas to borrow, and how, is left to you.
The book follows the structure of Principles of Neural Science, the field’s standard textbook, edited by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel and colleagues and now in its sixth edition. Each section notes the chapters it summarizes, so you can always go deeper.
How this book came to be
It began in 2020 as a set of notes Javier Luraschi took while reading Kandel, and for six years it remained an unfinished side project. Building AI tools and platforms at Hal9 is what changed that: the AI-assisted workflows developed there made it possible to pick the work back up, with AI helping to research, write, and illustrate each chapter, and a person deciding what goes in.
How the chapters work
- Principles are numbered and collected at the end of each chapter: the ideas the rest of the book builds on.
- Engineering lens asides translate ideas into the vocabulary of computing and machine learning — and say where the analogy breaks.
- Figures are original illustrations made for this book. On the web, many are interactive: point at a label to highlight a structure.
- Notes sit in the margin on wide screens and cite the primary literature.
Contents
- 1 BrainThe organization of the nervous system — its parts, cells, signals, circuits, computations, genes, and how we measure it. Read
- 2 NeuronsMembranes, ion channels, and how the action potential is generated. Planned
- 3 SynapsesElectrical and chemical transmission, integration, and neuromodulation. Planned
- 4 CognitionHow distributed circuits give rise to thought. Planned
- 5 PerceptionFrom receptors to representations in touch, vision, hearing, smell, and taste. Planned
- 6 MovementMotor units, reflexes, motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the basal ganglia. Planned
- 7 ConsciousnessUnconscious and conscious processing of information. Planned
- 8 BehaviorDevelopment, and how behavior emerges as the nervous system wires itself. Planned
- 9 LearningMemory, language, and the cellular basis of learning. Planned
- 10 CivilizationA world built by and for human brains, and where artificial systems fit in. Planned
- 11 ModelsModels that sit between neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Planned