Electrical engineering and neuroscience are converging — here's where, and where it's headed.
Where the ideas crossed
- The artificial neuron1943the neuron read as a thresholded sum of its inputs
- The voltage clamp1949the ionic currents underlying the action potential
- Hebbian learning1949Fire together, wire together
- The Hodgkin–Huxley model1952circuit theory, returned as silicon neurons
- Receptive fields in visual cortex1962microelectrodes and amplifiers quiet enough to isolate one cell
- The patch clamp1976single ion channels became observable
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation1985human motor cortex mapped non-invasively
- The silicon retina1988the retina's habit of reporting only change
- Neuromorphic computing1990the brain's spiking, event-driven efficiency
- Reward prediction error1997error-driven control and the prediction it corrects
- Neuropixels probes2017population dynamics across many areas simultaneously