What do you think about this? Who is the I? Where can I find it? Is it just mysticism?
I'm collaborating with a woman who has also been working with him to model some of our data with NENGO, so I should really get around to that sooner rather than later.
What are the best modern methods to analyze them?
CRCNS (https://crcns.org/data-sets) has some neurophysiology data (i.e., from implanted or inserted electrodes). This sort of data is shared a little less often, in part because it's often acquired and stored in weird, homebrew formats, though that's slowly changing.
ModelDB (https://senselab.med.yale.edu/ModelDB/) has a large collection of computational models. These are mostly biophysical models, though there's some other stuff in there too.
Depending on what you're looking for, there are other more specialized repositories. NDCT (https://data-archive.nimh.nih.gov/ndct) has mental-health related clinical trial data, though you'll have to do some paperwork if you want subject-level data, which is fairly common for clinical data. MIT has a collection of eye movement data sets: http://saliency.mit.edu/datasets.html
As for the best methods, this comment box is far too small to contain all my thoughts on that :-) It depends on your question and experiment. Sometimes, all you really need is a t-test (or the randomized version), but that requires getting the experiment just right. Other times, you might need a morass of signal processing and dimensionality reduction, fed into some giant multi-level Bayesian model in a vain attempt controls for all the stuff you neglected when you designed the damn experiment. Happy to send you some pointers if you have something specific in mind though!
Physics has historically had a huge leg up on the other sciences because they had real models that made testable, quantitative predictions. We're finally starting to learn enough about the brain that we can do this for neural data too, and I'm really excited about that!
I will definitely look through, and after digging around a bit I'd love to get some pointers. I have been curious about this for a long time, but uncertain where to look, so this is very exciting. Thank you again :)
Mostly Matlab, Python, and R, with a few things that have tight time/memory requirements in C++. Matlab was really popular in neuroscience for a very long time, so we still have a lot of code in m-files, but most labs are moving towards Python (and a few towards R).
The code quality varies a lot. Some of our "core" stuff is great, but there's also a lot of stuff that was written quickly and meant to be run once ("let's just try it"), which is cold comfort when you find it years later.
People also come in with varying levels of programming skill. I'm going to try to do actual code reviews with the undergrads this summer to see if we can't make our stuff a little less embarrassing.
I'll add, I work in a lab and have seen the stuff of nightmares myself.
We get about 1 Gb/min of neurophysiological data (x4-6 hours/day) and I'm hoping to scale that up quite a bit soon. People doing microscopy also generate giant datasets, as do the sequencing folks.
Me, specifically? A labmate showed me and said "It's cool...and a timesink."