Mead and Hopfield's first joint course in this area was entitled “Physics of Computation”; Hopfield teaching about his work in neural networks and Mead about his work in the area of recreating neuronal structures in highly integrated electronic circuits.
[3][5] At this point, Mead and Hopfield realized that a new field was emerging with neural scientists and the people doing the computer models and circuits all talking to each other.
In the fall of 1986, John Hopfield championed forming an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program to give birth to a scholarly community studying questions arising at the interface between neurobiology and electrical engineering, computer science and physics.
The creation of this multidisciplinary program stems largely from progress on several previously unrelated fronts: the analysis of complex neural systems at both the single-cell and the network levels [6] using a variety of techniques (in particular, patch clamp recordings, intracellular and extra-cellular single and multi-unit electrophysiology in the awake animal and functional brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)), the theoretical analysis of nervous structures (computational neuroscience) and the modeling of artificial neural networks for engineering purposes.
During this time, the executive officers of the CNS Program were John Hopfield, Demetri Psaltis, Christof Koch, and Pietro Perona.