This book was written with the goal of introducing researchers and students in a variety of research fields to the intersection of data science and neuroimaging. This book reflects our own experience of doing research at the intersection of data science and neuroimaging and it is based on our experience working with students and collaborators who come from a variety of backgrounds and have a variety of reasons for wanting to use data science approaches in their work. The tools and ideas that we chose to write about are all tools and ideas that we have used in some way in our own research. Many of them are tools that we use on a daily basis in our work. This was important to us for a few reasons: the first is that we want to teach people things that we ourselves find useful. Second, it allowed us to write the book with a focus on solving specific analysis tasks. For example, in many of the chapters you will see that we walk you through ideas while implementing them in code, and with data. We believe that this is a good way to learn about data analysis, because it provides a connecting thread from scientific questions through the data and its representation to implementing specific answers to these questions. Finally, we find these ideas compelling and fruitful. That’s why we were drawn to them in the first place. We hope that our enthusiasm about the ideas and tools described in this book will be infectious enough to convince the readers of their value.

This lecture covers the emergence of cognitive science after the Second World War as an interdisciplinary field for studying the mind, with influences from anthropology, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence.

This lecture provides an introduction to Plato’s concept of rationality and Aristotle’s concept of empiricism, and the enduring discussion between rationalism and empiricism to this day.

This lecture covers different perspectives on the study of the mental, focusing on the difference between Mind and Brain. 

This lecture covers the three big questions: What is the universe?, what is life?, and what is consciousness?

This lecture provides an introduction to the study of eye-tracking in humans. 

From the retina to the superior colliculus, the lateral geniculate nucleus into primary visual cortex and beyond, this lecture gives a tour of the mammalian visual system highlighting the Nobel-prize winning discoveries of Hubel & Wiesel.

From Universal Turing Machines to McCulloch-Pitts and Hopfield associative memory networks, this lecture explains what is meant by computation.

In an overview of the structure of the mammalian neocortex, this lecture explains how the mammalian cortex is organized in a hierarchy, describing the columnar principle and canonical microcircuits.

The retina has 60 different types of neurons. What are their functions? This lecture explores the definition of cell types and their functions in the mammalian retina.

Optical imaging offers a look inside the working brain. This lecture takes a look at orientation and ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex, and shows how they can be viewed with calcium imaging.

Functional imaging has led to the discovery of a plethora of visual cortical regions. This lecture introduces functional imaging techniques and their teachings about the visual cortex.

This lecture explains these ideas and explores the task of characterizing neuronal response properties using information theory.

What is color? This lecture explores how color is "made" in the brain and variations of color perception including trichromacy, color blindness in men, tetrachromatic vision in women, and genetic engineering of color perception.

How does the brain learn? This lecture discusses the roles of development and adult plasticity in shaping functional connectivity.

What is the difference between attention and consciousness? This lecture describes the scientific meaning of consciousness, journeys on the search for neural correlates of visual consciousness, and explores the possibility of consciousness in other beings and even non-biological structures.

This primer on optogenetics primer discusses how to manipulate neuronal populations with light at millisecond resolution and offers possible applications such as curing the blind and "playing the piano" with cortical neurons.