Think: Theory for Africa

Résumé

Understanding the brain is one of the most challenging scientific problems faced by humanity.In addition to offering an improved understanding of who we are, deciphering how our brains operate will provide payoffs for the treatment of mental and neurological disease as well as the creation of intelligent systems.Consequently, developed countries are pouring ever-increasing research funds into brain science.Prominent examples include the BRAIN initiative in the United States and the Human Brain Project in Europe.Although Africa may not yet possess financial and technological resources on this scale, Africans represent a vast and growing human resource poised to make important contributions to neuroscience.As the third yearly International Brain Research Organisation (IBRO)-Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo recently wrapped up in South Africa, we call for greater efforts to empower Africans to join the global neuroscience community and argue that the subfield of computational neuroscience is the ideal vehicle to do so.Computational and theoretical neuroscience, also known as neurotheory, or just "theory" within neurobiology, is a young, rapidly expanding field within neuroscience; its goal is to determine and articulate the general principles by which nervous systems perform their computations.We think it is a good example of how theory, as a subfield, can serve as a catalyst to accelerate the development of science in Africa.Due to the diversity of methods required for understanding the brain at multiple levels [1], skills are leveraged from a range of fields, such as biology, computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, physics, and psychology.Beyond just increasing our body of scientific knowledge, the impact of this interdisciplinary field is already significant to the clinic and industry: decoding algorithms are helping restore movement in paralyzed patients [2,3], and machine learning is continually influenced by engagement with neuroscience [4].A notable aspect of this growing field is its accessibility: computational neuroscience requires only data and individual expertise, independent of geographic location.There is growing momentum for experimentalists to make their data available for public access and for increased collaboration between groups, a movement lead by flagship projects that curate, systematize, and make freely available large-scale neuronal data [5-8].A parallel development has been the recent surge in open-access publishing and the establishment of alternative methods for accessing scientific papers outside of well-endowed institutions (e.g., ResearchGate, bioRxiv, and especially important in Africa, SciHub).These dual developments mean that aspiring African scientists in resource-limited settings have increasing access to the latest in both data and theory from across the broad field of neuroscience.From an African

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