NSC 510 Systems Neuroscience

Systems Neuroscience zooms out from single cells and synapses to ask how whole circuits in the brain actually produce behavior, how light becomes a perceived object, how intention becomes a coordinated movement, how the basal ganglia and cerebellum sculpt action in real time. You'll work through Kandel and Purves chapter by chapter, write up homework sets, and build a small project that ties a sensory or motor system to a clinical or perceptual phenomenon, with midterm and final exams checking that you can reason across pathways rather than just name them. It assumes you already know your cellular neuroscience and serves as the bridge to cognitive, computational, and clinical neuroscience, since almost every higher-level question eventually reduces to "which system, and how is it wired?"