Neuroscience

The brain, made of math

How far does one click spread? Drop the excitation below about 0.8 and a click dies out after a flash or two; raise it past 0.9 and the same click cascades across the tissue. The counter below measures it.

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Excitation 0.55 cells firing: 0 · last cascade: 0 spikes
About this model

The shape is a stylized point cloud, not anatomy. It is a procedural surface with two hemispheres, a cerebellum, and a stem, drawn in the site's glyph-and-dot language; no region boundary here is anatomically exact.

Each of the 3,600 cells is the leaky integrate-and-fire unit from lesson 2: charge leaks away, and a cell fires once it is pushed past threshold. The connections are simply each cell's 6 nearest neighbors in space, not real connectomics. The excitation slider scales how strongly a spike drives its neighbors.

Reference for the unit model: Gerstner et al., Neuronal Dynamics, section 1.3.

Chapters

3 chapters · 10 lessons · 1 lab
01 Neurons & Spikes 4 lessons · membrane · integrate-and-fire · summation → 02 Neural Coding 3 lessons · tuning curves · population codes · noise → 03 Plasticity & Networks 3 lessons · hebbian learning · weight matrices · attractors →