What are good literature recommendations to understanding attractors? I'm a PhD student in Neuroscience working in human physiology. Recently I'm trying to get a better understanding of computational neuroscience as it applies to my field. It is in this context that I am trying to understand attractors. I am in particular looking for literature that explains attractors in a non-mathematical way. Ideally, I would also like to introspect some MATLAB code that demonstrates a point attractor and a line attractor, to get an intuitive grasp of the basic concepts. I have read about Attractors on Scholarpedia in various contexts (e.g. continuous attractor networks), but I am having a hard time understanding the role of time in these models. What are good literature recommendations to understanding attractors?

Especially for neuroscientists, I would recommend Izhikevich's book, which you can find in its entirety here. If you're keen on MATLAB, check out Stephen Lynch's book on the subject. This is especially good for an intuitive introduction.

In my opinion, the best high-level book on general dynamical systems is Guckenheimer and Holmes, though you may save this one for later.

EDIT: For a good "peek" into the computational neuroscientist's toolbox, I highly recommend ModelDB, a large online database of neural models. For example, I searched "attractor + matlab" on this database and got these links, some of which may interest you.