Computing for Neuroscience

NSC 546 teaches you to treat MATLAB as the working lab bench of systems neuroscience — the place where spike trains, stimuli, and behavioral data actually get cleaned, modeled, and tested. You'll grind through programming homework that builds from vectors and control flow up to Fourier analysis, FitzHugh-Nagumo spiking models, bootstrapping, and ROC analysis, plus a project where you design and execute an analysis end-to-end (Psychtoolbox is there if you need to generate stimuli). It's the computational backbone for the rest of the neuroscience curriculum: once you can write the code that turns raw recordings into a defensible statistical claim, every later experimental or modeling course stops being a black box.