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Reasoning has long been understood as a pathway between stages of understanding. Proper reasoning leads to understanding of a given subject. This reasoning was conceptualized as a process of understanding in a particular way, i.e.,…
The human brain is ultimately responsible for all thoughts and movements that the body produces. This allows humans to successfully interact with their environment. If the brain is not functioning properly many abilities of human can be…
Variants of the Kohonen model are proposed to study biological principles of self-organization in a model of young brain. We suggest a function to measure aquired knowledge and use it to auto-adapt the topology of neuronal connectivity,…
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…
Hallmarks of criticality, such as power-laws and scale invariance, have been empirically found in cortical networks and it has been conjectured that operating at criticality entails functional advantages, such as optimal computational…
Over the last decade, significant progress has been made in understanding complex biological systems, however there have been few attempts at incorporating this knowledge into nature inspired optimization algorithms. In this paper, we…
The brain is in a state of perpetual reverberant neural activity, even in the absence of specific tasks or stimuli. Shedding light on the origin and functional significance of such a dynamical state is essential to understanding how the…
Significant challenges exist globally regarding literacy teaching and learning. To address these challenges, key features of how the brain works should be taken into account. First, perception is an active process based in detection of…
The brain is a highly complex organ consisting of a myriad of subsystems that flexibly interact and adapt over time and context to enable perception, cognition, and behavior. Understanding the multi-scale nature of the brain, i.e., how…
It has long been argued that neural networks have to establish and maintain a certain intermediate level of activity in order to keep away from the regimes of chaos and silence. Strong evidence for criticality has been observed in terms of…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural and artificial systems. We test this hypothesis by evolving foraging agents controlled by neural networks that can change the system's…
Spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) is an organizing principle of biological neural networks. While synchronous firing of neurons is considered to be an important functional block in the brain, how STDP shapes neural networks possibly…
Neuronal networks alternate between high- and low-activity regimes, known as up and down states. They also display rhythmic patterns essential for perception, memory consolidation, and sensory processing. Despite their importance, the…
Artificial Intelligence has historically relied on planning, heuristics, and handcrafted approaches designed by experts. All the while claiming to pursue the creation of Intelligence. This approach fails to acknowledge that intelligence…
To further advance our understanding of the brain, new concepts and theories are needed. In particular, the ability of the brain to create information flows must be reconciled with its propensity for synchronization and mass action. The…
Coordinating multi-articulated bodies to generate purposeful movement is a formidable computational challenge. Yet the human motor system performs this task robustly in dynamic, uncertain environments, despite noisy and delayed feedback,…
The brain is very often viewed as a network, be it at small scale made of cells, mostly neurons, or at larger scale made of neuronal assemblies. Here we introduce a conjecture, in the spirit of a philosophical though experiment, which…
Lateralization is ubiquitous in vertebrate brains which, as well as its role in locomotion, is considered an important factor in biological intelligence. Lateralization has been associated with both poor and good performance. It has been…
Learning requires the traversal of inherently distinct cognitive states to produce behavioral adaptation. Yet, tools to explicitly measure these states with non-invasive imaging -- and to assess their dynamics during learning -- remain…