Electives to Prepare for Theoretical Neuroscience

A common question undergrads have once they find out about the Theoretical Neuroscience lab I belong to, and theoretical neuroscience in general, is “what electives should I take?” Usually these people are in an engineering discipline and have desperately few electives to begin with, so this is a very urgent question to them.

If you go to the Centre of Theoretical Neuroscience homepage you see a list of useful electives. However, that’s a pretty exhaustive list, so here’s what I found useful in my personal experience.

Arsty Courses

This assumes you have some art electives you need to get rid of anyways. Don’t bother taking extra art courses. It’s pretty easy to get up to date with a domain or an investigation method by reading articles or participating in CogSci.SE.

Stay away from any courses that require you to pass a bunch of quizzes. These are borderline useless memorisation courses. Go for ones where you have to write essays. This will make you learn how to communicate technical information and philosophical arguments in an effective manner, which is actually super important.

Techy Courses

To succeed in theoretical neuroscience research, you need a few skills:

• Know what a vector, Fourier transform, Laplace transform and Bayes rule is
• Know what a feedback system is and what it’s transfer function is
• Know how to program (if you know what a for-loop, an if-statement, a function are, then you know how to program) with bonus points for knowing how to analyse data using a programming language. Note, you can get most of this knowledge from Software Carpentry materials.

With these requirements in mind, look for courses that can give you this knowledge. Bonus points for AI courses (especially Reinforcement Learning) and Deep Learning, but they aren't super necessary since that’s pretty easy to teach yourself on your own.

Sciency Courses

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself, what about neurons and anatomy? That is a really deep rabbit hole. If you are going to take a neuroanatomy course, make sure it has a lab so that you can play with models and specimens to get a better idea of how everything fits together. As for neuroscience, I found it covered well enough in theoretical neuroscience courses that I never felt the need to jump into a pure neuroscience course.

Mathy Courses

All math is good, but I admittedly haven’t done much of it outside of my engineering curriculum (although I do plan to do more stochastic processes soon), so I can’t really recommend anything specifically.

Courses Aren’t Everything

Having a community of people you can ask questions to and discuss problems with is way more important than any course.

Hopefully this helps! If I’ve missed anything, let me know in a reply or via Twitter.