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Research and Intuition
So far I was very fortunate with my scientific long-term mentors and supervisors: both of them are kind, open, creative and stunningly intelligent. I could not wish for more. However, when asked about a role model, I would mention a … Continue reading
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The spikefinder dataset
Recently, I mentioned a public competition for spike detection – spikefinder.codeneuro.org. I decided to spend a day two days and have a closer look at the datasets, especially the training datasets that provide both simultaneously recorded calcium and spike trains for single neurons. In … Continue reading
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The crow as an animal model for neuroscience
Close to my apartment in the outskirts of Basel, green fields and some small woods lie basically in front of my house door. This is also where some flocks of crows gather around, partly searching the fields for food, partly … Continue reading
Posted in electrophysiology, Imaging, Neuronal activity, Uncategorized
Tagged consciousness, electrophysiology, zebrafish
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Reglo ICC serial port control via Matlab
For my experiments with zebrafish, I typically generate dynamic odor landscapes for the fish / fish brain explant by varying the speed of the wheels of an Ismatec peristaltic pump, thereby changing the concentration of the applied stimuli over time. Recently, I bought one of their digital … Continue reading
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Tagged Cole-Parmer, Ismatec, Matlab, Reglo ICC, serial port, USB
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Aphantasia
A couple of days ago, during a hiking tour close to Luzern, I met a medical doctor from Israel who decided to join me for my hike for the rest of the day. After some time, when I made fun of … Continue reading
EODs for kHz imaging
J. Schneider et al., and S. Hell recently published a paper on STED microscopy, using EODs (electro-optical deflectors) to scan 512 x 512 pixels at frame rates of 1000 Hz. Compared to AODs, EODs offer the costumer-friendly advantage of not dispersing … Continue reading
A pockels cell with a broken crystal
In a 2P microscope, pockels cells are employed for fast control of the laser beam intensity. I use it for both switching off the laser beam during turnarounds of the resonant scanner, between two frames if they are not immediately one after … Continue reading
Finding the engram
In their Nature Reviews|Neuroscience article, Finding the engram, Sheena Josselyn, Stefan Köhler and Paul Frankland discuss the recent developments, mainly in circuit neuroscience in mice, that contributed to finding memories on the cellular level, the so-called engram. They accumulate the evidence from … Continue reading
A simple non-graphical user interface in Matlab : keyboard callback functions
I’m not the first person to be annoyed by Matlabs guide (a tool used to generate GUIs that, unfortunately, are difficult to understand and painful to modify afterwards). Some months ago, I was looking for a way to implement a lightweight user interface for analyzing big … Continue reading
A network of pointers
When thinking about the way we think, it certainly makes sense to begin with a point which is also used by our thoughts as a starting point, which is sensual experience. To give an example, it is easy to imagine how a … Continue reading
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Tagged associative network, neuronal network, pointers, theoretical neuroscience
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A blog about neurophysiology 