What is Computational Neuroscience?

I wanted to write this story to let people, especially young ones who are encouraged to study computational neuroscience, know what we should know about this field.

You may hear of the titles like psychophysicists, computational neuroscientists, system neuroscientists, neural computation specialist… etc. You may even hear that artificial intelligence and neuroscience were mentioned together in many seminars and talks. Computational Neuroscience is a kind of field that includes all these names and topics.

I am a master student in this field or with formal words MSc. Computational Neuroscience, Cognition and AI at the University of Nottingham. Now I understand that even I did not know what was waiting for me in this field before I started to the masters and that is the reason I wanted to tell you before you get into it.

So what is it?

Computational Neuroscience (which is also named theoretical or mathematical neuroscience) includes less computation than you would think. Computational and coding side is the easy side of it which we are left to do and learn by ourselves. The things that we do learn in the classes are crazy long math formulas, mathematical modelling, how to simulate these stuff from the maths, and analysis of physics in cognitive processes in a theoretical way. Therefore, yes, maths and physics are way more important than your computer skills, which is sometimes killing you softly.