The development of computational modelling in neuroscience

The field of computational modelling in neuroscience has been in existence for almost 100 years. During that time it has gone through several stages of development. From the 1930s, researchers in the field of mathematical biophysics conceived of mathematical and physical models of biophysical phenomena. In the more neural applications, there was work on how networks of nerve cells could store and retrieve information through the adaptive tuning of the thresholds of selected nerve cells (Shimbel, 1950), on linking psychophysical judgements with the underlying neural mechanisms (Landahl, 1939) and mathematical accounts of how nerve cells could act as logical elements and what the computational capabilities of a network of such elements were (McCulloch and Pitts, 1943). From the 1950s onwards there was interest in treating the brain as a uniform medium and calculating its modes of behaviour, such as the conditions under which it would support the propagation of waves of activity across it (Beurle, 1956). Much of this work laid the foundation for the field of artificial neural networks in the 1950s and 1960s.