Chapter 1 – Philosophy

In this chapter, we outline the current state of neuroscience and the need to integrate the emerging field of data science with neuroscience, yielding the field of neural data science. We detail how this new field contrasts with classic computational neuroscience and also give a brief history of data science, showing why it needs refinements to calibrate it to the special needs arising when handling neural data. We describe the role of neural data scientists in the neuroscience of the future and compare it to that of full-stack engineers. Finally, we justify covering both MATLAB and Python jointly in this book and explain why we did not deem it necessary to cover other languages.