Brian: a simulator for spiking neural networks in Python

We present Brian, a new clock driven simulator for spiking neural networks which is available on almost all platforms.Brian is easy to learn and use, highly flexible and easily extensible.The Brian package itself and simulations using it are all written in the Python programming language, which is very well adapted to these goals.Python is an easy, concise and highly developed language with many advanced features and development tools, excellent documentation and a large community of users providing support and extension packages.Brian allows you to write very concise, natural and readable code for simulations, and makes it quick and efficient to play with these models (for example, changing the differential equations doesn't require a recompile of the code).Figure 1 shows an example of a complete network implemented in Brian, a randomly connected network of integrate and fire neurons with exponential inhibitory and excitatory currents (the CUBA network from [1]).