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The segregated regions of the mammalian cerebral cortex and thalamus form an extensive and complex network, whose structure and function are still only incompletely understood. The present article describes an application of the concepts of…
Thalamus has traditionally been considered as only a relay source of cortical inputs, with hierarchically organized cortical circuits serially transforming thalamic signals to cognitively-relevant representations. Given the absence of local…
Animals thrive in a constantly changing environment and leverage the temporal structure to learn well-factorized causal representations. In contrast, traditional neural networks suffer from forgetting in changing environments and many…
Inhibition is considered to shape neural activity, and broaden its pattern repertoire. In the sensory organs, where the anatomy of neural circuits is highly structured, lateral inhibition sharpens contrast among stimulus properties. The…
Since the earliest electroencephalography experiments, large scale oscillations have been observed in the mammalian brain. More recently, episodes of oscillation and bursting have been identified not only in the cerebral cortex and…
Goal-driven selective attention (GDSA) refers to the brain's function of prioritizing the activity of a task-relevant subset of its overall network to efficiently process relevant information while inhibiting the effects of distractions.…
The information transfer in the thalamus is blocked dynamically during sleep, in conjunction with the occurence of spindle waves. As the theoretical understanding of the mechanism remains incomplete, we analyze two modeling approaches for a…
Both biological cortico-thalamic networks and artificial transformer networks use canonical computations to perform a wide range of cognitive tasks. In this work, we propose that the structure of cortico-thalamic circuits is well suited to…
The hypothalamus plays an important role in the regulation of the bodys metabolic state and behaviors related to survival. Despite its importance however, many questions exist regarding the intrinsic and extrinsic connections of the…
We introduce techniques for exploring the functionality of a neural network and extracting simple, human-readable approximations to its performance. By performing gradient ascent on the input space of the network, we are able to produce…
Propagation of oscillatory signals through the cortex and coherence is shaped by the connectivity structure of neuronal circuits. This study systematically investigates the network and stimulus properties that shape network responses. The…
The thalamus is the major gate to the cortex and its control over cortical responses is well established. Cortical feedback to the thalamus is, in turn, the anatomically dominant input to relay cells, yet its influence on thalamic…
Cortical circuits exhibit intricate recurrent architectures that are remarkably similar across different brain areas. Such stereotyped structure suggests the existence of common computational principles. However, such principles have…
Distributed networks of brain areas interact with one another in a time-varying fashion to enable complex cognitive and sensorimotor functions. Here we use novel network analysis algorithms to test the recruitment and integration of…
Global brain activity self-organizes into discrete patterns characterized by distinct behavioral observables and modes of information processing. The human thalamocortical system is a densely connected network where local neural activation…
In this article we present new results on neural networks with linear threshold activation functions. We precisely characterize the class of functions that are representable by such neural networks and show that 2 hidden layers are…
Cognition is supported by neurophysiological processes that occur both in local anatomical neighborhoods and in distributed large-scale circuits. Recent evidence from network control theory suggests that white matter pathways linking…
To meet ongoing cognitive demands, the human brain must seamlessly transition from one brain state to another, in the process drawing on different cognitive systems. How does the brain's network of anatomical connections help facilitate…
Over the past two decades, an increasing array of control-theoretic methods have been used to study the brain as a complex dynamical system and better understand its structure-function relationship. This article provides an overview on one…
Goal-driven selective attention (GDSA) is a remarkable function that allows the complex dynamical networks of the brain to support coherent perception and cognition. Part I of this two-part paper proposes a new control-theoretic framework,…