Ph.D., Columbia University
Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science
Departments of Physics and Neuroscience
718 Barus and Holley
Tel: (401) 863-2585
Email: Leon_Cooper@Brown.edu
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A goal of our research is to elucidate the biological mechanisms that underlie learning and memory: to find principles of organization that can account both for experimental data on the cellular level and, when applied to large numbers of neurons that receive sensory and/or interneuronal information, for various higher level systems properties. Networks of neurons already have been constructed that can organize themselves to display some cognitive properties. Although these are still primitive compared to what animals or even machines in some cases can presently do, it is of significance that these networks are self-organizing, that the global cognitive properties are the result of local modifications of the network components -- learning (so to speak) on a cellular level. This learning comes about through the modification of synaptic junctions (connections) between neurons. A crucial hypothesis concerns the form of this synaptic modification. We attempt to test our ideas concerning synaptic modification by applying them to the development of selectivity and ocular dominance in cat visual cortex, where much experimental data has been obtained in the lat twenty years. This leads to a theory of synaptic evolution based on sets of coupled non-linear stochastic differential equations. Analysis and computer simulations are used to investigate the agreement of the theory with classical experimental results.

Yeung, L. C., B. S. Blais, L. N Cooper and H. Z. Shouval (2003). Calcium as the associative biochemical
signal for a model of Hebbian plasticity: application to multi-input environments. Neurocomputing 52-4 : 437-440.

Shouval, H. Z., G. C. Castellani, B. S. Blais, L. C. Yeung and L. N Cooper (2002). Converging evidence for
a simplified biophysical model of synaptic plasticity. Biol Cybern 87 (5-6): 383-91.

Remondini, D., N. Intrator, G. Castellani, F. Bersani and L. N Cooper (2002). Optimal spontaneous activity
in neural network modeling. Neurocomputing 44 : 591-595.

Predrag Neskovic, P. C. Davis and Leon N Cooper, "Interactive Parts Model: an Application to Recognition of On-line Cursive Script," NIPS 13, (2001).

Brian Blais, Leon N Cooper, Harel Shouval, "Formation of Direction Selectivity in Natural Scene Environments," Neural Computation 12, 1057-1066 (2000).

Leon N Cooper, "Memories and Memory: A Physicist's Approach to the Brain," International Journal of Modern Physics A, Vol. 15, No. 26 (2000).