Related papers: Biological efficiency in processing information
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…
Statistical properties of environments experienced by biological signaling systems in the real world change, which necessitate adaptive responses to achieve high fidelity information transmission. One form of such adaptive response is gain…
In computer science, we can theoretically neatly separate transmission and processing of information, hardware and software, and programs and their inputs. This is much more intricate in biology, Nevertheless, I argue that Shannon's concept…
Living systems, from single cells to higher vertebrates, receive a continuous stream of non-stationary inputs that they sense, e.g., via cell surface receptors or sensory organs. Integrating these time-varying, multi-sensory, and often…
Biological molecular machines are enzymes that simultaneously catalyze two processes, one donating free energy and second accepting it. Recent studies show that most native protein enzymes have a rich stochastic dynamics that often…
Information transmission in biological signaling circuits has often been described using the metaphor of a noise filter. Cellular systems need accurate, real-time data about their environmental conditions, but the biochemical reaction…
In biological systems, sensing is not performed by the brain alone: the body deforms, vibrates, and filters external stimuli before they are transduced into neural signals. In engineered systems, this processing burden is placed largely on…
Signal transduction in biological cells is effected by signaling pathways that typically include multiple feedback loops. Here we analyze information transfer through a prototypical signaling module with biochemical feedback. The module…
Plants solve complex problems without centralized control, relying instead on growth-driven dynamics to sense, navigate, and optimize resource acquisition. This review presents a unified physical framework for understanding plant behavior…
For a general sensory system following an external stochastic signal, we introduce the sensory capacity. This quantity characterizes the performance of a sensor: sensory capacity is maximal if the instantaneous state of the sensor has as…
Information exchange is a critical process in all communication systems, including biological ones. The concept of retroactivity represents the loads that downstream modules apply to their upstream systems in biological circuits. This paper…
Living systems efficiently use chemical fuel to do work, process information, and assemble patterns despite thermal noise. Whether high efficiency arises from general principles or specific fine-tuning is unknown. Here, applying a recent…
Biological organisms must perform computation as they grow, reproduce, and evolve. Moreover, ever since Landauer's bound was proposed it has been known that all computation has some thermodynamic cost -- and that the same computation can be…
Because organisms are able to sense its passage, it is perhaps tempting to treat time as a sensory modality, akin to vision or audition. Indeed, certain features of sensory estimation, such as Weber's law, apply to timing and sensation…
Limited spectrum resources and dramatic growth of high data rate applications have motivated opportunistic spectrum access utilizing the promising concept of cognitive networks. Although this concept has emerged primarily to enhance…
Predicting future observations plays a central role in machine learning, biology, economics, and many other fields. It lies at the heart of organizational principles such as the variational free energy principle and has even been shown --…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
We introduce the concept of efficiency of a network, measuring how efficiently it exchanges information. By using this simple measure small-world networks are seen as systems that are both globally and locally efficient. This allows to give…
Scale-free and non-computable characteristics of natural networks are found to result from the least-time dispersal of energy. To consider a network as a thermodynamic system is motivated since ultimately everything that exists can be…