Introduction to Computational Neuroscience with Neuroblox
This MIT OpenCourseWare course teaches computational neuroscience through hands-on model building in Neuroblox, a modular simulation platform built on the Julia programming language. You work through brief background presentations followed by exercises and open-ended challenges, simulating published models that range from single neurons to large circuits with synaptic plasticity, then fitting them to real neural data. By the end you can build custom computational building blocks (called blox), assemble them into circuits spanning scales from spiking neurons to brain-wide fMRI signals, and test how interventions such as drugs or stimulation probes change circuit behavior. The course also covers comparing multiple model variants to distinguish between competing hypotheses in neurology and psychiatry research. Prior coding experience helps but is not required. Materials come from MIT's Laboratory for Computational Neurodiagnostics and are freely available online with no cost to access.