Böcker i Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience-serien

This book brings together a selection of papers by George Gerstein, representing his long-term endeavor of making neuroscience into a more rigorous science inspired by physics, where he had his roots. Professor Gerstein was many years ahead of the field, consistently striving for quantitative analyses, mechanistic models, and conceptual clarity.  In doing so, he pioneered Computational Neuroscience, many years before the term itself was born.  The overarching goal of George Gerstein's research was to understand the functional organization of neuronal networks in the brain. The editors of this book have compiled a selection of George Gerstein's many seminal contributions to neuroscience--be they experimental, theoretical or computational--into a single, comprehensive volume .The aim is to provide readers with a fresh introduction of these various concepts in the original literature.  The volume is organized  in a series of chapters by subject, ordered in time, each one containing one or more of George Gerstein's papers.

Reviews the most intriguing applications of fractal analysis in neuroscience with a focus on current and future potential, limits, advantages, and disadvantages.

Neuromechanics is a new, quickly growing field of neuroscience research that merges neurophysiology, biomechanics and motor control and aims at understanding living systems and their elements through interactions between their neural and mechanical dynamic properties. Although research in Neuromechanics is not limited by computational approaches, neuromechanical modeling is a powerful tool that allows for integration of massive knowledge gained in the past several decades in organization of motion related brain and spinal cord activity, various body sensors and reflex pathways, muscle mechanical and physiological properties and detailed quantitative morphology of musculoskeletal systems. Recent work in neuromechanical modeling has demonstrated advantages of such an integrative approach and led to discoveries of new emergent properties of neuromechanical systems. Neuromechanical Modeling of Posture and Locomotion will cover a wide range of topics from theoretical studies linking the organization of reflex pathways and central pattern generating circuits with morphology and mechanics of the musculoskeletal system (Burkholder; Nichols; Shevtsova et al.) to detailed neuromechanical models of postural and locomotor control (Bunderson; Edwards, Marking et al., Ting). Furthermore, uniquely diverse modeling approaches will be presented in the book including a theoretical dynamic analysis of locomotor phase transitions (Spardy and Rubin), a hybrid computational modeling that allows for in vivo interactions between parts of a living organism and a computer model (Edwards et al.), a physical neuromechanical model of the human locomotor system (Lewis), and others.

This book serves as a step towards a systematic approach to validation of neuro-computational models used for studying brain diseases and should be useful for all neuro-computational modellers.