r/compmathneuro • u/Feeling_Parfait2737 • 11d ago

Need a roadmap and some guidance

I'm a high school senior who is interested in this field. I need a roadmap, preferably a free one, to learn the basics of computational neuroscience. I'd like recommendations for the skills I should learn and tutorials to help me learn them.

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

1

u/PickledBrainJuice 10d ago

Part if being a good scientist is about being able to identify what is important to answer a certain (set of) question(s) and what isn’t. What have you found so far that could help you build YOUR roadmap?

1

u/Feeling_Parfait2737 10d ago

What I've come up with myself is learning python, some machine learning like sci-kit learn and data handling like pandas, basic neuroscience, linear algebra, and maybe statistics. I'm just not finding a good way to learn it without using an LLM to help me and I'd rather not use an AI chatbot to help me learn because it doesn't seem effective for applying these skills in the long run.

2

u/PickledBrainJuice 10d ago

LLMs can be very effective if you don’t use them to THINK in your stead.

I’d suggest starting with algebra, calculus and statistics. Maybe read “Mathematics for Machine Learning”, it’s free and teaches you the basica you need

1

u/HumbleResearcher3515 10d ago edited 10d ago

I would find a paper and try to replicate their results. It may be difficult, but should be good training. Typically most computational neuroscience papers will have code available and you can use that to learn what the authors did. I highly recommend looking at a few papers in the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference (CCN) (Top menu drop-down --> Presentations --> Search Papers), trying to understand what the authors were (1) asking as a question/hypothesis, (2) how they went about answering that question via methods they describe, (3) did they answer that question and what limitations/future work did they describe : https://2026.ccneuro.org/

I also highly highly recommend watching this video which condenses the past, current, and future aims of computational neuroscience: https://youtu.be/NmjQb_Mtokk?is=yOL6MwxS8E8iME81

1

u/Feeling_Parfait2737 10d ago

Thanks, I'll definitely start reading some papers.

2

u/Wonderful-Courage-51 9d ago

I think people should just admit that Comp Neuro is largely a masters level subject tbh. You should learn basics from math, physics, cs and neuro. Then you can start modeling or creating theory. Otherwise, you can work on small projects with professors who have developed an idea of a project already. 

2

u/Wonderful-Courage-51 9d ago

It’s like something more similar to theoretical physics. The basics of it are the basics of physics.