72849 - Neurosciences

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, the student acquires the major information on the main Cognitive Neurosciences topics, such as perception, learning and memory, emotions and language. In particular, the student is able to: manage the information received; read and comprehend neuroscience papers; use this neuroscience background for bioinformatics.

Course contents

 

ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY OF NERVE CELLS 

Anatomy and types of nerve cells. Electrical phenomena. Equilibrium potential. Resting membrane potential. Genesis and propagation of the action potential. Graded potentials. Synaptic transmission.

ORGANIZZATION OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

General anatomy and functions of the central and peripheral nervous system. General principles of the organization of the central nervous system. The cerebral cortex: anatomy and functional organization. The autonomous nervous system: anatomical-functional organization and functions of the parasympathetic and orthosympathetic nervous system.

SENSORY SYSTEMS

General principles of sensory coding. Receptive fields. Coding of the intensity of the stimuli. Mechanisms of rate-coding and population-coding. Sensory receptors. Temporal mechanisms, adaptation, spatial sensory integration. Perception.

SOMATOSENSORY SYSTEM

Neuronal coding of somatosensory stimuli. Organization of the somatosensory circuit.Thalamic nuclei and somatosensory cortical areas. The general organization of tactile perception and position senses. Psychophysics of tactile perception.

VISUAL SYSTEM

Visual perception. Retina and photoreceptors. Organization of the visual pathway, lateral geniculate nucleus. Primary visual cortex: topographic organization and functional circuits. Visual maps, brain maps. Functional organization of extrastriate visual areas. Two cortical visual pathways: dorsal and ventral stream. Organization and functions of the ventral visual stream.

SENSORIMOTOR INTEGRATION

Organization and functions of the dorsal visual stream. Lesions: optic ataxia, agnosia. Posterior parietal cortex: sensorimotor integration functions. Areas of the posterior parietal cortex and specific functions.

VOLUNTARY MOVEMENT ORGANIZATION

Premotor and supplementary motor cortex. Parietofrontal circuits for reaching and grasping movements. Sensorimotor transformations. Organization of the prefrontal cortex. Eye movements: cortical and subcortical circuits. Hand movements: psychophysical aspects. Primary motor cortex and movement control mechanisms.

ROLE OF CEREBELLUM AND OF BASAL GANGLIA IN MOVEMENT CONTROL

Movement monitoring and regulation. The cerebellum: anatomical-functional organization, microcircuit, afferent and efferent pathways. Basal ganglia: morphofunctional organization, direct and indirect pathways.

NEUROSCIENCE METHODS

Modern neuroscience techniques: optogenetics, digital reconstruction of anatomical data. Computational methods of analysis of single neuron activity (temporal spiking) and of the population (hidden Markov models). Artificial neural networks and decoding algorithms in the field of neuroprosthetics.

Readings/Bibliography

Kandel ER,  Jessell TM, Schwartz JH, Siegelbaum SA, Hudspeth AJ. Principles of Neural Science, 5th ed. Mc Graw-Hill

Purves D, et al., Neurosciences, 6th ed. Sinauer Associates

Articles and reviews will be provided to supplement these texts.

Teaching methods

Lectures, covering the whole Course Program. The Course consists of 4 CFU, corresponding to 32 hours of teaching. Slides shown during lectures are mostly taken from suggested readings. If not, the reference is indicated.

Assessment methods

The final exam consists of an oral interview, which will be the presentation and critical discussion of one of topics examined during the course, at student's choice, and subsequent verification of the basic knowledge on all the topics covered during the course.

Teaching tools

Lectures will be done using a set of slides (powerpoint) concerning each topic of the Course Program. The slides material will come mainly from the suggested textbooks. All relevant teaching material can be downloaded from the website https://iol.unibo.it/ by students enrolled at the University of Bologna (University institutional username and password required) .

In order to prepare for the exam it is suggested to attend the lectures, study from a textbook and use both the notes taken during lectures and the IOL material.

Due to the kind of activity and didactical methods, attending the present course requires the prior participation of all students to the following e-learning Modules 1 and 2:

Module 1 [https://elearning-sicurezza.unibo.it/course/view.php?id=23] – Safety General Training

Module 2 [https://elearning-sicurezza.unibo.it/course/view.php?id=43] – Safety Specific Training (part I)

Office hours

See the website of Konstantinos Chatzidimitrakis