Direction
Neuro → EE
Nervous systems solve engineering problems under constraints no chip designer would accept, and they solve them on a few watts. These are the designs worth stealing, and the circuits built from them.
Devices
Models
- Neuromorphic computing 1990 Building computation from analog devices in their physics-limited regimes and from spikes rather than clocked arithmetic, on the argument that the brain's efficiency comes from its style of computing.
- Efficient coding 1961 The proposal that sensory systems are built to remove redundancy from their input, which turns "why is the retina wired this way" into an information-theory question.
- Cable theory 1959 Treating a dendrite as a leaky transmission line, borrowed from nineteenth-century telegraph engineering, which showed that dendrites compute rather than merely collect.
- The Hodgkin–Huxley model 1952 Circuit theory borrowed to explain the axon as a capacitor with voltage-dependent conductances — then handed back decades later as the template for analog silicon neurons.
- The artificial neuron 1943 Stripping the neuron to a weighted sum and a threshold, which gave engineering a computing element built from biology and is still the unit inside every network built since.