The time is ripe to reverse engineer an entire nervous system: simulating behavior from neural interactions

Understand

Just like electrical engineers understand how microprocessors execute programs in terms of how transistor currents are affected by their inputs, neuroscientists want to understand behavior production in terms of how neuronal outputs are affected by their inputs and internal states.

• This dependency of neuronal outputs on inputs can be described by a state-dependent input-output (IO)-function.
• However, to reliably identify these IO-functions, we need to perturb each input and combinations of inputs while observing all the outputs.
• Here, we argue that such completeness is possible in C.