Dharmendra S. Modha

William Risk pointed out the following extremely interesting page that aummarizes the work of several Nobel-prize winning researches:

Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1906)
Charles Sherrington and Edgar Adrian (1932)
Sir Henry Dale and Otto Loewi (1936)
Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser (1944)
Alan Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley and Sir John Eccles (1963)
Sir Bernard Katz, Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod (1970)
Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini (1986)
Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann (1991)
Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel (2000)

Last year, Larry Abbott wrote a beautiful review article summarising the explosive growth in theoretical neuroscience over the past 20 years. I really enjoyed the paper.

Abstract: Theoretical neuroscience has experienced explosive growth over the past 20 years. In addition to bringing new researchers into the field with backgrounds in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering, theoretical approaches have helped to introduce new ideas and shape directions of neuroscience research. This review presents some of the developments that have occurred and the lessons they have taught us.

A paper in PNAS by Lars Muckli, Marcus J. Naumerd and Wolf Singer provides remarkable evidence of plasticity in the brain.

Abstract: In mammals smooth retinotopic maps of the visual field are formed along the visual processing pathway whereby the left visual field is represented in the right hemisphere and vice versa. The reorganization of retinotopic maps in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus and early visual areas (V1–V3) is studied in a patient who was born with only one cerebral hemisphere. Before the seventh week of embryonic gestation, the development of the patient’s right cerebral hemisphere terminated. Despite the complete loss of her right hemisphere (di- and telencephalon) at birth, the patient’s remaining hemisphere has not only developed maps of the contralateral (right) visual hemifield but, surprisingly, also maps of the ipsilateral (left) visual hemifield. Retinal ganglion-cells changed their predetermined crossing pattern in the optic chiasm and grew to the ipsilateral LGN. In the visual cortex, islands of ipsilateral visual field representations were located along the representations of the vertical meridian. In V1, smooth and continuous maps from contra- and ipsilateral hemifield overlap each other, whereas in ventral V2 and V3 ipsilateral quarter field representations invaded small distinct cortical patches. This reveals a surprising flexibility of the self-organizing developmental mechanisms responsible for map formation.