Related papers: How does neural activity encode spontaneous motor …
Human learning is a complex phenomenon requiring flexibility to adapt existing brain function and precision in selecting new neurophysiological activities to drive desired behavior. These two attributes -- flexibility and selection -- must…
Our understanding of the neural basis of locomotor behavior can be informed by careful quantification of animal movement. Classical descriptions of legged locomotion have defined discrete locomotor gaits, characterized by distinct patterns…
This paper argues that self-awareness is a learned behavior that emerges in organisms whose brains have a sufficiently integrated, complex ability for associative learning and memory. Continual sensory input of information related to the…
Like a rocket being propelled into space, evolution has engineered flies to launch into adulthood via multiple stages. Flies develop and deploy two distinct bodies, linked by the transformative process of metamorphosis. The fly larva is a…
For animals living in groups, one of the important questions is to understand what are the decision-making mechanisms that lead to choosing a motion direction or leaving an area while preserving group cohesion. Here, we analyse the…
Investigations of nerve activity have focused predominantly on electrical phenomena. Nerves, however, are thermodynamic systems, and changes in temperature and in the dimensions of the nerve can also be observed during the action potential.…
Slow-wave sleep in mammalians is characterized by a change of large-scale cortical activity currently paraphrased as cortical Up/Down states. A recent experiment demonstrated a bistable collective behaviour in ferret slices, with the…
Jellyfish cyborgs present a promising avenue for soft robotic systems, leveraging the natural energy-efficiency and adaptability of biological systems. Here we demonstrate a novel approach to predicting and controlling jellyfish locomotion…
Animals can learn efficiently from a single experience and change their future behavior in response. However, in other instances, animals learn very slowly, requiring thousands of experiences. Here I survey tasks involving fast and slow…
The brain did not develop a dedicated device for reasoning. This fact bears dramatic consequences. While for perceptuo-motor functions neural activity is shaped by the input's statistical properties, and processing is carried out at high…
Humans and other animals coactivate agonist and antagonist muscles in many motor actions. Increases in muscle coactivation are thought to leverage viscoelastic properties of skeletal muscles to provide resistance against limb motion.…
Collective motion is one of the most ubiquitous behaviours displayed by social organisms and has led to the development of numerous models. Recent advances in the understanding of sensory system and information processing by animals impel…
Adult neurogenesis has long been documented in the vertebrate brain, and recently even in humans. Although it has been conjectured for many years that its functional role is related to the renewing of memories, no clear mechanism as to how…
Synaptic connections between neurons in the brain are dynamic because of continuously ongoing spine dynamics, axonal sprouting, and other processes. In fact, it was recently shown that the spontaneous synapse-autonomous component of spine…
Adolescence is marked by rapid development of executive function. Mounting evidence suggests that executive function in adults may be driven by dynamic control of neurophysiological processes. Yet, how these dynamics evolve over adolescence…
Single trial analyses of ensemble activity in alert animals demonstrate that cortical circuits dynamics evolve through temporal sequences of metastable states. Metastability has been studied for its potential role in sensory coding, memory…
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…
Trajectories from a pair of interacting zebrafish are used to test for the existence of anticipatory dynamics in natural systems. Anticipatory dynamics (AD) is unusual in that causal events are not necessarily ordered by their temporal…
Motions of visually coupled zebrafish pairs are studied to understand the effects of information exchange on their behavior as a function of their minimal separation ($d$). We find that when $d$ is small, the pair can display a…
Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…