Related papers: Why dream? A Conjecture on Dreaming
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
Neural activity fluctuates over a wide range of timescales within and across brain areas. Experimental observations suggest that diverse neural timescales reflect information in dynamic environments. However, how timescales are defined and…
Replay is the reactivation of one or more neural patterns, which are similar to the activation patterns experienced during past waking experiences. Replay was first observed in biological neural networks during sleep, and it is now thought…
Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate hallucinations -- plausible but factually incorrect outputs -- undermining their reliability. While prior work has examined hallucinations from macroscopic perspectives such as training data…
We have recognized that 2D codes, i.e., a group of strongly connected neurosomes that can be simultaneously excited, are the basic data carriers for memory in a brain. An echoing mechanism between two neighboring layers of neurosomes is…
Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex,…
Learning and decision making in the brain are key processes critical to survival, and yet are processes implemented by non-ideal biological building blocks which can impose significant error. We explore quantitatively how the brain might…
It has been proposed that there is a wave excitation in animal brains, whose function is to represent three-dimensional space around the animal as a working spatial memory. After surveying the evidence supporting the hypothesis, I discuss…
When our eyes are presented with the same image, the brain processes it to view it as a single coherent one. The lateral shift in the position of our eyes, causes the two images to possess certain differences, which our brain exploits for…
Do biological cells sense time by the number of their divisions, a process that ends at senescence? We consider the question "can the cell's perception of time be expressed through the length of the shortest telomere?" The answer is that…
The importance of sleep is paramount for maintaining physical, emotional and mental wellbeing. Though the relationship between sleep and physical activity is known to be important, it is not yet fully understood. The explosion in popularity…
This paper describes some biologically-inspired processes that could be used to build the sort of networks that we associate with the human brain. New to this paper, a 'refined' neuron will be proposed. This is a group of neurons that by…
Understanding how decision making changes across the lifespan is a central challenge for neuroscience, yet research on cognitive aging has remained largely disconnected from the theoretical and computational advances that now shape modern…
Semantic representations in higher sensory cortices form the basis for robust, yet flexible behavior. These representations are acquired over the course of development in an unsupervised fashion and continuously maintained over an…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Hallucinations and delusions are often grouped together within the positive symptoms of psychosis. However, recent evidence suggests they may be driven by distinct computational and neural mechanisms. Examining the time course of their…
It is widely believed that the particular wiring observed within cortical columns boosts neural computation. We use rewiring of neural networks performing real-world cognitive tasks to study the validity of this argument. In a vast survey…
Until recently, artificial neural networks were typically designed with a fixed network structure. Here, I argue that network structure is highly relevant to function, and therefore neural networks should be livewired (Eagleman 2020):…
A novel theory for cell differentiation is proposed, based on simulations with interacting artificial cells which have metabolic networks within, and divide into two when the final product is accumulated. Results of simulations with coupled…
We build on progress in understanding the role of glia cells in building the initial networks in the foetal brain. This has led us to make three significant postulates. Short term memory results from glia cells forming speculative links…