Name: Principles of Neural Design
ISBN: 9780262534680

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.

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ChaitanyaSaiJun 2022

This looks like it is derived from their fantastic book "The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-sensitive-soul That book is a more thorough dive into understanding how the mechanisms of consciousness could have been pieced together in evolutionary time. The authors do not have a computational backround, which makes their Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework a bit too much of a black-box model. That said, the book is thoughtful, balanced and scholarly -- and beautifully written. And, it is also not bogged down by the obdurate and unreasonable certainty one often sees with other grand theories of consciousness (which are almost always underwhelming). They even call this out in Sensitive Soul:

"... The claims about consciousness that are being made today, at the beginning of the third millennium, are in some ways less provocative, but they are by no means less confident. In fact, not just Edelman and Crick, but each of the prominent neurobiologists whose work we describe in this chapter believes that he (they are all male) and his group have conceptually solved the great enigma."

Sensitive Soul is an essential read if you are interested in consciousness. It is one of the few books we give special mention to in our own book, Journey of the Mind (plug! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...)

"More recent books that we think are excellent and which also influenced us heavily include Principles of Neural Design by Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin, Evolution of Nervous Systems by Jon Kaas, Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul by Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, and Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers."

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ChaitanyaSaiMar 2022

What a great question!

The book that got me into neuroscience was Phantoms in the Brain by V. S Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. A 22-year old book that wowed 20-year-old me. Principles of Neural Design by Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin is a more recent book. It is brilliant, beautifully written and probably should be required reading for anyone looking to do graduate studies in neuroscience. In a field inundated with data and siloes and jargon, it bats for a focus on jargon-free understanding of principles that can explain much of the complexity. It was hugely inspirational for us when doing our own book (plug alert!).

I hope that Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, a book I co-authored, a book which drew inspiration from these two books, is able to do the same for many looking to study neuroscience and AI now.

Phantoms in the Brain https://www.amazon.com/Phantoms-Brain-Probing-Mysteries-Huma...

Principles of Neural Design https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Design-MIT-Press/dp...

Journey of the Mind https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Mind-Thinking-Emerged-Chaos/d...

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robwwilliamsFeb 2022

This is a false dichotomy—simulation versus Reality. When Neo woke to reality was it Reality or another higher order simulation?

Could we not just redefine our capital R reality as a damn fine simulation? Isn’t that the message behind almost all spirituality and religion?

This pseudo-question belongs in the trash heap of philosophy along with mind-brain dualism.

It is a question generated by murky thinking—-credit to Wittgenstein for pointing out the obvious. Read Richard Rorty—any thing really but “Truth and Progress” a good place to start.

If you want way more insight than Chalmers will ever provide then read either “The Quantum Thief” by Hannu Rajaniemi, or hardcore neuroscience: “Principles of Neural Design” by Sterling and Laughlin.

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eli_gottliebJul 2020

As someone working at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning: thank you, very much. You might enjoy this book we use as a bible in our lab: http://cognet.mit.edu/book/principles-of-neural-design

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westoncbFeb 2020

Kind of an odd title and book, but I think it may do a good job of what you're looking for:

"Principles of Neural Design": https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Design-MIT-Press/dp...

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themeiguorenMar 2019

I would argue that we have definitely scratched the tip, though there’s a lot more iceberg to go.

To anyone interested in this, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of “Principles of Neural Design”. It’s a look at how and why brains operate the way they do, from thermodynamic and information theory axioms up. A lot of the biology went a good bit over my head, but the authors do a great job of developing a set of hardware-agnostic principles that all brains follow.

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