In From Computer to Brain: Foundations of Computational Neuroscience, William Lytton provides a gentle but rigorous introduction to the art of modeling neurons and neural systems. It is an accessible entry to the methods and approaches used to model the brain at many dierent levels, ranging from synapses and dendrites to neurons and neural circuits. Different types of questions are asked at each level that require dierent types of models.

Biology undergraduates, medical students and life-science graduate students often have limited mathematical skills. Similarly, physics, math and engineering students have little patience for the detailed facts that make up much of biological knowledge. Teaching computational neuroscience as an integrated discipline requires that both groups be brought forward onto common ground. This book does this by making ancillary material available in an appendix and providing basic explanations without becoming bogged down in unnecessary details. The book will be suitable for undergraduates and beginning graduate students taking a computational neuroscience course and also to anyone with an interest in the uses of the computer in modeling the nervous system.