The brain is the organ of the human body that controls our movements, gives rise to conscious perception, thought, emotions, and enables us to learn, to plan, to make decisions, to reason, and to engage in the myriad of other functions that make us human. The brain is composed of billions of neurons that communicate with each other in a network that is shaped by development and learning. Akin to the way we design electronic circuits, evolution is thought to have used the trick of using smaller networks, referred to as neural circuit, as repeating building blocks of larger networks. We believe that the key to understanding brain function lies in understanding these building blocks of the nervous system, the neural circuits...
The Basel circuit neuroscience community is a collection of research laboratories that pursue the question of what the circuit elements are that biology uses to build the nervous system.