History and Biological Rationale[s] of NFT

The loose collection of neurobiological insights and mathematical framings nowadays referred to as Neural Field Theory (NFT) saw their first concrete expression in print in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Interestingly, these ‘field theories of neural nets’ were much closer in spirit to the cognitive science-oriented ideas of McCulloch & Pitts, connectionist psychology, and what eventually became modern deep learning, than to those of their more biochemistry and physiology-focused contemporaries such as Hodgkin & Huxley or Goldman & Cole. In subsequent decades, some scientists would look to ground NFT formulations on a more concrete neurobiological footing, whereas others would focus more on their properties as pattern-forming dynamical systems and computational units. It was not until some time in the early 1970s that NFT had its Annus Mariabis - with Amari, Wilson-Cowan, and Nunez respectively introducing key ideas into the mix around inhibition, meso-scale columnar lateral connections, columnar physiology, and macroscopic brain geometry and connectivity. The history of NFT’s development since then, particularly in the area or human neurophysiology and neuroimaging, might reasonably described as a series of footnotes to Nunez. 50 years on, although NFT has arguably still not yet quite ‘hit the big time’ amongst neuroscientists and brain mappers at large, its influence on many major recent developments in the field are undeniable. As steady progress is made on techniques for imaging brain structure, connectivity, and activity dynamics, the contributions of NFT to discovery and understanding in human brain mapping research looks set to increase at a steady clip.
In this introductory lecture, I offer a largely non-technical survey of the key conceptual pillars of neural field theory (NFT), following the chronology of ideas from the 1940s through to 2025 and beyond. The aim is to lay foundations and set the scene for subsequent talks in the workshop, where the core mathematics, neurobiology, and concrete cutting-edge applications of NFT are discussed at length.