Firenze-Neuro

Welcome to the Firenze-Neuro site where we present the activity of the Computational Neuroscience Lab at the Institute for Complex Systems within the National Research Council (ISC-CNR) in Florence, Italy.

Computational neuroscience is an interdisciplinary discipline in which modelling and analysis tools derived from mathematics, physics and computer science are used to investigate how the nervous system processes information. It mostly relies on the development, simulation, and analysis of multi-scale models of brain function, from the level of molecules through single neurons and neuronal networks up to cognition and behaviour. The analysis of real electrophysiological data recorded from various locations of the brain on different temporal and spatial scales is used to validate the models.

Our computational neuroscience work in Florence goes along two main lines of research, theoretical analysis of neuronal networks and data analysis. The first line relies mostly on the modelling and simulation of neuronal networks using simple models (such as Integrate and Fire and Hodgkin-Huxley for the single neurons or Wilson-Cowan at the population level). Currently, particular attention is devoted to research on hub cells, which are neurons able to strongly impact and control the network dynamics. The second line deals with the analysis of electrophysiological recordings such as EEG and neuronal spike trains. Here a recent focus of interest is neuronal population coding, i.e., the study of how the sensory world is represented in the action potentials of neuronal networks in the brain.

Here you can find information on who we are, our publications, our software packages, our teaching, the various kinds of theses available and our dissemination activities.