Neuroscience

14 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Neuroscience.

• Axonal Transport — Supply a neuron's remote, synthetically helpless synaptic terminals from its central soma via motor proteins walking microtubule tracks — kinesin outward, dynein inward — so a failure starves the terminal first, producing a distal dying-back signature.
• Central Executive Network — Coordinate goal-directed, externally oriented cognition through a distributed frontoparietal control network that maintains task rules, working-memory contents, and top-down attention while flexibly coupling to other systems as demands change.
• Central Pattern Generator — A localized neural circuit that produces structured rhythmic motor output — locomotion, breathing, chewing — from its own intrinsic membrane and synaptic properties, so sensory and descending signals are demoted from pacemakers to mere modulators.
• Neuroplasticity — The nervous system rewires itself in response to experience by strengthening or weakening synapses under fixed rules of change, with how much it can rewire gated by a developmental window that is wide in youth and narrower in the adult.
• Neurotransmission — Locate a neuron's flexibility not in the all-or-none spike but in the transformation across the synaptic gap — a quantal, probabilistic, context-modulated transfer decomposable into an ordered chain of mechanism slots that drugs and disorders each perturb at one point.
• Place Cell — A hippocampal neuron that fires only when the animal occupies a specific region of the world (its place field) — allocentrically referenced, so that the joint pattern across many such cells forms a distributed spatial code decodable to centimetre scale.
• Place Field — Reify a place cell's spatial tuning as a measurable object — the bounded region where its firing rate is reliably elevated — turning 'the hippocampus represents space' into a battery of scalars (size, peak, stability, remapping) that travel across preparations.
• Purkinje Effect — Explain why red darkens and blue seems to glow at dusk: as light falls, the eye hands off from cones (peaking ~555 nm) to rods (peaking ~507 nm), so a whole different sensitivity curve — not the surfaces — reweights apparent brightness.
• Retinotopy — Preserve the two-dimensional layout of the visual field as a two-dimensional layout on visual cortex — adjacent points in the world projecting to adjacent neurons — an invertible map that lets a lesion predict a scotoma and a rotating stimulus reconstruct the map.
• Salience Network — Model a control network — anterior insula and dorsal ACC hubs — that detects behaviourally relevant events and switches the brain between its two content networks (internally directed default mode and externally directed executive), so cognition is read as a configuration plus a switching variable rather than a catalogue of regions.
• Somatotopy — Represent the body surface on neural tissue as a continuous neighbourhood-preserving map — adjacent body regions projecting to adjacent neural loci — with magnification set by receptor density and behavioural importance rather than body size, and reshaped by an activity-dependent plasticity rule.
• Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity — A synaptic learning rule where the sign of a weight change depends on the millisecond order of pre- and postsynaptic spikes — pre-before-post potentiates, post-before-pre depresses — turning a coincidence detector into a causality detector that grows directed connectivity.
• Synaptic Plasticity — The capacity of individual synapses to undergo lasting changes in transmission efficacy driven by their joint activity history, giving memory a physical address as a modifiable weight distribution and organizing a family of mechanisms along direction, timescale, polarity, modality, and gating.
• Synaptic Pruning — During nervous-system development and plasticity, activity and molecular tagging selectively eliminate weaker or inappropriate synapses, refining exuberant early connectivity into efficient, experience-shaped circuits.