Related papers: Approximate invariance of metabolic energy per syn…
Background: Information processing in the brain requires large amounts of metabolic energy, the spatial distribution of which is highly heterogeneous reflecting complex activity patterns in the mammalian brain. Results: Here, it is found…
Dendritic spines, the carriers of long-term memory, occupy a small fraction of cortical space, and yet they are the major consumers of brain metabolic energy. What fraction of this energy goes for synaptic plasticity, correlated with…
Darwinian evolution tends to produce energy-efficient outcomes. On the other hand, energy limits computation, be it neural and probabilistic or digital and logical. Taking a particular energy-efficient viewpoint, we define neural…
Learning and memory relies on synapses changing their strengths in response to neural activity. However there is a substantial gap between the timescales of neural electrical dynamics (1-100 ms) and organism behaviour during learning…
Mammalian brains span about 4 orders of magnitude in cortical volume and have to operate in different environments that require diverse behavioral skills. Despite these geometric and behavioral diversities, the examination of cerebral…
It has long been known that neurons in the brain are not physiologically homogeneous. In response to current stimulus, they can fire several distinct patterns of action potentials that are associated with different physiological classes…
Performing more tasks in parallel is a typical feature of complex brains. These are characterized by the coexistence of excitatory and inhibitory synapses, whose percentage in mammals is measured to have a typical value of 20-30\%. Here we…
Brains consume metabolic energy to process information, but also to store memories. The energy required for memory formation can be substantial, for instance in fruit flies memory formation leads to a shorter lifespan upon subsequent…
Synaptic plasticity, the dynamic tuning of signal transmission strength between neurons, serves as a fundamental basis for memory and learning in biological organisms. This adaptive nature of synapses is considered one of the key features…
Across metazoans, early embryos exhibit a strikingly conserved slowing down of their cell duplication speed, despite widely varying developmental paces and underlying molecular mechanisms. Here we show that this common behavior arises…
The generation of spikes by neurons is energetically a costly process and the evaluation of the metabolic energy required to maintain the signalling activity of neurons a challenge of practical interest. Neuron models are frequently used to…
Temporal resolution of visual information processing is thought to be an important factor in predator-prey interactions, shaped in the course of evolution by animals' ecology. Here I show that light can be considered to have a dual role of…
Memories are stored, retained, and recollected through complex, coupled processes operating on multiple timescales. To understand the computational principles behind these intricate networks of interactions we construct a broad class of…
Learning and memory are acquired through long-lasting changes in synapses. In the simplest models, such synaptic potentiation typically leads to runaway excitation, but in reality there must exist processes that robustly preserve overall…
The generation of spikes by neurons is energetically a costly process. This paper studies the consumption of energy and the information entropy in the signalling activity of a model neuron both when it is supposed isolated and when it is…
The brain is not only constrained by energy needed to fuel computation, but it is also constrained by energy needed to form memories. Experiments have shown that learning simple conditioning tasks already carries a significant metabolic…
Sleep is one of the most noticeable and widespread phenomena occurring in multicellular animals. Nevertheless, no consensus for a theory of its origins has emerged. In particular, no explicit, quantitative theory exists that elucidates or…
Competition between synapses arises in some forms of correlation-based plasticity. Here we propose a game theory-inspired model of synaptic interactions whose dynamics is driven by competition between synapses in their weak and strong…
Primates exhibit a robust deviation from canonical allometric scaling: at fixed body mass, their lifespans exceed those of non-primate mammals by factors of two to three. A rhesus macaque (8 kg) lives 25-40 years, whereas a cat of similar…
Brain is one of the most energy demanding organs in mammals, and its total metabolic rate scales with brain volume raised to a power of around 5/6. This value is significantly higher than the more common exponent 3/4 relating whole body…