神経工学の潮流

抄録

The Moore's law predicting that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months since 1970's has been underlying industrial innovation. In the field of neuroscience, a similar trend is observed for the number of simultaneously recorded neuronal cells, which has doubled every 7.4 years since the late 1950's. Neural engineering has emerged from the confluence of these two technological trends and has significantly promoted a number of progresses in our understanding of the brain and the developments of neural prosthesis. In the present paper, we introduce how innovative instrumentation engineering and information technologies have brought benefits in our daily physiological experiments and sometimes led to major discoveries in a discontinuous manner. Furthermore, increasing capacity to acquire and analyze massive data may change not only treatments of neural data, but also scientific approaches in neuroscience.