Ask Slashdot: DIY Computational Neuroscience?

An anonymous reader writes "Over the last couple years, I have taught myself the basic concepts behind Computational Neuroscience, mainly from the book by Abbott and Dayan. I am not currently affiliated with any academic Neuroscience program. I would like to take a DIY approach and work on some real world problems of Computational Neuroscience. My questions: (1) What are some interesting computational neuroscience simulation problems that an individual with a workstation class PC can work on? (2) Is it easy for a non-academic to get the required data? (3) I am familiar with (but not used extensively) simulators like Neuron, Genesis etc. Other than these and Matlab, what other software should I get? (4) Where online or offline, can I network with other DIY Computational Neuroscience enthusiasts? My own interest is in simulation of Epileptogenic neural networks, music cognition networks, and perhaps a bit more ambitiously, to create a simulation on which the various Models of Consciousness can be comparatively tested."

Comments

Study and practice this in private.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very noble to want to learn and to further educate yourself. But for the sake of the professionals in the field, I do encourage you to engage in your study and practice of this field in private.

To me, it looks like a situation very close to those amateur "computer programmers" who end up creating disasters using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL and whatever the NoSQL flavor-of-the-day is today.

Nobody would have a problem if these "computer programmers" developed their software on their own, but then kept it to themselves. That is rarely the case, however. They release their software, without realizing the severe security holes it often contains. Then other people who don't know better end up using it.

Months or years later, a disaster of some sort happens (a security breach, data loss, and so on), and a professional gets dragged in to try to solve the problems. This wastes the professional's time, which is often very expensive. It also angers them, because it's a problem that would have been unavoidable had the amateurs just kept to themselves.

So unless you're aiming to become a professional in this field, rather than just an amateur or a hobbyist, I strongly recommend that you study this in private, for the sake of the community as a whole.