Related papers: Why dream? A Conjecture on Dreaming
The human brain is a complex network of interconnected brain regions organized into functional modules with distinct roles in cognition and behavior. An important question concerns the persistence and stability of these modules over the…
Memory can be defined as the ability to retain and recall information in a diverse range of forms. It is a vital component of the way in which we as human beings operate on a day to day basis. Given a particular situation, decisions are…
The fundamental, powerful process of computation in the brain has been widely misunderstood. The paper [1] associates the general failure to build intelligent thinking machines with current reductionist principles of temporal coding and…
For 20 years the beautiful structure in the grid cell code has presented an attractive puzzle: what computation do these representations subserve, and why does it manifest so curiously in neurons. The first question quickly attracted an…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
The brain is a complex system comprising a myriad of interacting elements, posing significant challenges in understanding its structure, function, and dynamics. Network science has emerged as a powerful tool for studying such intricate…
The widespread adoption of large language and vision models in real-world applications has made urgent the need to address hallucinations -- instances where models produce incorrect or nonsensical outputs. These errors can propagate…
In the present article, we investigate the effects of dormancy on an abstract population genetic level. We first provide a short review of seed bank models in population genetics, and the role of dormancy for the interplay of evolutionary…
We consider the contact process with dormancy, where wake-up times follow a renewal process. Without infection between dormant individuals, we show that the process under certain conditions grows at most logarithmically. On the other hand,…
One of the central aims of neuroscience is to reliably predict the behavioral response of an organism using its neural activity. If possible, this implies we can causally manipulate the neural response and design brain-computer-interface…
Perceptions and actions, thoughts and memories result from coordinated activity in hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain. It is an old dream of the physics community to provide a statistical mechanics description for these and…
Neuroscientists today can measure activity from more neurons than ever before, and are facing the challenge of connecting these brain-wide neural recordings to computation and behavior. Here, we first describe emerging tools and…
"Dreaming" enables agents to learn from imagined experiences, enabling more robust and sample-efficient learning of world models. In this work, we consider innovations to the state-of-the-art Dreamer model using probabilistic methods that…
Increasing evidence suggests that cortical dynamics during wake exhibits long-range temporal correlations suitable to integrate inputs over extended periods of time to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in decision-making and working memory…
Many systems neuroscientists want to understand neurons in terms of mediation; we want to understand how neurons are involved in the causal chain from stimulus to behavior. Unfortunately, most tools are inappropriate for that while our…
Light sleep is a sleeping period which occurs within each hour during the sleep. This is the period when people are closest to awakening. With this being the case people tend to move more frequently and aggressively during these periods.…
We review the recent proposal that the most fascinating brain properties are related to the fact that it always stays close to a second order phase transition. In such conditions, the collective of neuronal groups can reliably generate…
Stationarity of the constituents of the body and of its functionalities is a basic requirement for life, being equivalent to survival in first place. Assuming that the resting state activity of the brain serves essential functionalities,…
Connecting neural activity to function is a common aim in neuroscience. How to define and conceptualize function, however, can vary. Here I focus on grounding this goal in the specific question of how a given change in behavior is produced…
A key element of the European Union's Human Brain Project (HBP) and other large-scale brain research projects is simulation of large-scale model networks of neurons. Here we argue why such simulations will likely be indispensable for…