Ideas at the border of electrical engineering and neuroscience — the instruments that made discoveries possible, and the biology worth stealing designs from.https://nerveee.com/https://nerveee.com/topics/cable-theory/https://nerveee.com/topics/cable-theory/Treating a dendrite as a leaky transmission line, borrowed from nineteenth-century telegraph engineering, which showed that dendrites compute rather than merely collect.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTboth waysmodelimpedancehierarchyenergy-efficiencyhttps://nerveee.com/topics/cochlear-implants/https://nerveee.com/topics/cochlear-implants/An electrode array in the cochlea driven by a filter bank, which restores speech understanding using a couple of dozen channels where the ear has thousands.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neurodevicepopulation-codingenergy-efficiencyimpedancehttps://nerveee.com/topics/deep-brain-stimulation/https://nerveee.com/topics/deep-brain-stimulation/Chronically implanted electrodes delivering continuous high-frequency pulses, which treat Parkinsonian symptoms effectively while nobody fully agrees on why.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neuromethodadaptive-controlfeedbackimpedancehttps://nerveee.com/topics/efficient-coding/https://nerveee.com/topics/efficient-coding/The proposal that sensory systems are built to remove redundancy from their input, which turns "why is the retina wired this way" into an information-theory question.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTneuro→eemodelsparse-codingnoiseenergy-efficiencyhttps://nerveee.com/topics/electroencephalography/https://nerveee.com/topics/electroencephalography/Microvolt potentials measured at the scalp, which established that the brain has continuous electrical rhythms and states rather than only responses to stimuli.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neurodevicenoisepopulation-codingimpedancehttps://nerveee.com/topics/functional-mri/https://nerveee.com/topics/functional-mri/Imaging brain activity indirectly through the magnetic signature of blood oxygenation, which gave whole-brain maps of task-related activity without surgery or tracers.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neuromethodnoisepopulation-codinghttps://nerveee.com/topics/hodgkin-huxley-model/https://nerveee.com/topics/hodgkin-huxley-model/Circuit theory borrowed to explain the axon as a capacitor with voltage-dependent conductances — then handed back decades later as the template for analog silicon neurons.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTboth waysmodelimpedancefeedbackenergy-efficiencyhttps://nerveee.com/topics/patch-clamp/https://nerveee.com/topics/patch-clamp/A glass pipette sealed against a membrane made the current through single ion channels measurable, turning channels from inference into instrument readings.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neurodevicenoiseimpedancehttps://nerveee.com/topics/neuropixels/https://nerveee.com/topics/neuropixels/A CMOS shank carrying nearly a thousand recording sites with the amplifiers and multiplexers on the probe itself, which made recording hundreds of neurons at once routine.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neurodevicepopulation-codingnoiseenergy-efficiencyhttps://nerveee.com/topics/programmable-stimulation-waveforms/https://nerveee.com/topics/programmable-stimulation-waveforms/Synthesising the stimulus pulse with a modular converter instead of inheriting whatever the output stage rings at, which turns shape and timing into experimental variables.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neuromethodadaptive-controlenergy-efficiencyfeedbackhttps://nerveee.com/topics/receptive-fields-in-visual-cortex/https://nerveee.com/topics/receptive-fields-in-visual-cortex/Cortical cells respond not to spots of light but to oriented edges at particular positions, and to progressively more abstract features further along the pathway.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neuromodelhierarchysparse-codingpopulation-codinghttps://nerveee.com/topics/reward-prediction-error/https://nerveee.com/topics/reward-prediction-error/Dopamine neurons signal not reward but the difference between reward received and reward expected — an error signal, of exactly the kind a feedback controller runs on.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neuromodellearning-rulesfeedbackadaptive-controlhttps://nerveee.com/topics/the-voltage-clamp/https://nerveee.com/topics/the-voltage-clamp/A feedback amplifier that holds membrane potential at a commanded value and reports the current needed to do it, which is what turned excitability into a measurable quantity.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neuromethodfeedbackimpedancenoisehttps://nerveee.com/topics/two-photon-microscopy/https://nerveee.com/topics/two-photon-microscopy/Using the near-simultaneous arrival of two photons to confine fluorescence to a single focal point, which made optical recording deep in living tissue possible.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neurodevicenoisepopulation-codinghttps://nerveee.com/topics/the-artificial-neuron/https://nerveee.com/topics/the-artificial-neuron/Stripping the neuron to a weighted sum and a threshold, which gave engineering a computing element built from biology and is still the unit inside every network built since.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTneuro→eemodellearning-rulespopulation-codingenergy-efficiencyhttps://nerveee.com/topics/microelectrode-arrays/https://nerveee.com/topics/microelectrode-arrays/Photolithographed electrode grids traded single-channel resolution for many cells at once, which is what turned single-unit recording into population dynamics.Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neurodeviceimpedancenoisehttps://nerveee.com/topics/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/https://nerveee.com/topics/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/Discharging a capacitor bank through a coil induces enough electric field inside the skull to fire cortical neurons, making non-invasive stimulation of a chosen region possible.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTee→neuromethodenergy-efficiencyimpedanceadaptive-controlhttps://nerveee.com/topics/silicon-retina/https://nerveee.com/topics/silicon-retina/Analog VLSI built to copy the retina's habit of reporting change rather than absolute brightness, which is the ancestor of every event camera shipping today.Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTneuro→eedevicesparse-codingenergy-efficiencyhttps://nerveee.com/topics/neuromorphic-computing/https://nerveee.com/topics/neuromorphic-computing/Building computation from analog devices in their physics-limited regimes and from spikes rather than clocked arithmetic, on the argument that the brain's efficiency comes from its style of computing.Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTneuro→eemodelsparse-codingenergy-efficiencyfeedback