Principles of Neural Design

Neuroscience research has exploded, with mountains of new facts and mechanisms emerging from research laboratories around the world. And yet a principled framework for organizing all 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 avoid speculation about how the brain might work and endeavor to make sense of what is already known. Their distinctive contribution is to gather a coherent set of basic rules and exemplify them across spatial and functional scales.