Thalamocortical Assemblies

Alain Destexhe is a Professor and Research Director at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientfic Research). He is Vice Director of the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience (NeuroPSI), one of the largest Neuroscience research institutes in France, and he is also the founder and director of the European Institute of Theoretical Neuroscience (EITN). He is a specialist of electrophysiology and computational neuroscience, and his research team studies brain states in general, such as the wake-sleep cycle, anesthesia, epilepsy and states of minimal consciousness. These subjects are investigated using a mix of experimental data and computational approaches, from mice to humans.Terrence Sejnowski is a pioneer in Computational Neuroscience and recipient of the 2022 International Gruber Prize in Neuroscience. He is the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he a co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation. He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Foundation, which organizes the largest annual conference on artificial intelligence. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors.

This handsome book is an elegant presentation of two decades of modeling of the electrical activity of the thalamocortical circuits of higher vertebrates. The subject is of great relevance to basic and clinical neuroscience. An excellent source for those wishing to understand and/or model the electrophysiology of thalamic neurons.

• 1: Introduction 2: Biophysical models of the membrane potential and ionic currents 3: Electrophysiological properties of thalamic relay neurons 4: Electrophysiological properties of thalamic reticular neurons 5: Biophysical models of synaptic interactions 6: Spindle oscillations in thalamic circuits 7: Spindle oscillations in the thalamocortical system 8: Thalamocortical mechanisms for spike-and-wave epileptic seizures 9: A physiological role for sleep oscillations