Visualizing the visual system

As part of a forthcoming planetarium show about the human brain, we are pro ducing realistic models of the central nervous system at a variety of scale s, from whole brain images to images of individual neurons. We have focused on the visual system and especially the visual cortex, and are building se ts of simulated neurons using stochastic growth rules that mimic the geomet ries of actual neurons. We anticipate that some of the techniques we have d eveloped in this work may also prove useful in various areas of computation al neuroscience. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.