Related papers: The brain: What is critical about it?

Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…

There is evidence that biological systems, such as the brain, work at a critical regime robust to noise, and are therefore able to remain in it under perturbations. In this work, we address the question of robustness of critical systems to…

Recent advances in experimental techniques have allowed the simultaneous recording of populations of hundreds of neurons, allowing more comprehensive investigation into the nature of the collective structure of population neural activity.…

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to adapt to new situations, by applying learned rules to new content (systematicity) and thereby enabling an open-ended number of inferences and actions (generativity). Here, we propose that…

The brain as an astonishingly remarkable device has been studied from various angles. It is now well known that neurons are the seat of all activities of the brain function. The dynamical properties pertaining to a single neuron and a…

Among the versatile forms of dynamical patterns of activity exhibited by the brain, oscillations are one of the most salient and extensively studied, yet are still far from being well understood. In this paper, we provide various structural…

We present experimental and theoretical arguments, at the single neuron level, suggesting that neuronal response fluctuations reflect a process that positions the neuron near a transition point that separates excitable and unexcitable…

The theoretical base for consciousness, in particular an explanation of how consciousness is defined by the brain, has long been sought by science. We propose a partial theory of consciousness as relations defined by typical data. The…

Flexible modulation of temporal dynamics in neural sequences underlies many cognitive processes. For instance, we can adaptively change the speed of motor sequences and speech. While such flexibility is influenced by various factors such as…

We have analysed the many facets of Consciousness into two distinct categories. First: the organisational state of the neural networks at any one time, which determines whether a person is conscious - awake, or unconscious - asleep. Second:…

The bias/variance tradeoff is fundamental to learning: increasing a model's complexity can improve its fit on training data, but potentially worsens performance on future samples. Remarkably, however, the human brain effortlessly handles a…

The brain is a complex organ characterized by heterogeneous patterns of structural connections supporting unparalleled feats of cognition and a wide range of behaviors. New noninvasive imaging techniques now allow these patterns to be…

Much evidence seems to suggest cortex operates near a critical point, yet a single set of exponents defining its universality class has not been found. In fact, when critical exponents are estimated from data, they widely differ across…

It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural, artificial and their evolutionary systems. We put this hypothesis to test in a system of evolving foraging agents controlled by neural…

Computational modeling plays an increasingly important role in neuroscience, highlighting the philosophical question of how computational models explain. In the context of neural network models for neuroscience, concerns have been raised…

Conscious awareness refers to the association of information processing in the brain that is accompanied by subjective, reportable experiences. Current models of conscious access propose that sufficiently strong sensory stimuli ignite a…

In cognitive network neuroscience, the connectivity and community structure of the brain network is related to cognition. Much of this research has focused on two measures of connectivity - modularity and flexibility - which frequently have…

Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…

Computation in the brain involves multiple types of neurons, yet the organizing principles for how these neurons work together remain unclear. Information theory has offered explanations for how different types of neurons can optimize the…

A new description of the neural activity is introduced by the neuro-flow dynamics and the extended Hebb rule. The remarkable characteristics of the neuro-flow dynamics, such as the primacy and the recency effect during awakeness or sleep,…