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We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying…
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in neuron-glia communication. This interest stems from the realization that glia participates in cognitive functions and information processing and is involved in many brain disorders and…
The adaptive fitness of an organism in its ecological niche is highly reliant upon its ability to associate an environmental or internal stimulus with a behavior response through reinforcement. This simple but powerful observation has been…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in the development of techniques for measuring the activity and connectivity of large populations of neurons in the brain. However, as these techniques grow ever more powerful---allowing us to even…
The paper reviews and summarizes recent developments in spatial auditory and tactile brain-computer interfacing neurotechology applications. It serves as the latest developments summary in "non-visual" brain-computer interfacing solutions…
Attractor dynamics are a fundamental computational motif in neural circuits, supporting diverse cognitive functions through stable, self-sustaining patterns of neural activity. In these lecture notes, we review four key examples that…
Tremendous neuroscientific progress has recently been made by mapping brain connectivity, complementing extensive knowledge of task-evoked brain activation patterns. However, despite evidence that they are related, these connectivity and…
To interpret our surroundings, the brain uses a visual categorization process. Current theories and models suggest that this process comprises a hierarchy of different computations that transforms complex, high-dimensional inputs into…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
One of the hallmark features of neocortical anatomy is the presence of extensive top-down projections into primary sensory areas, with many impinging on the distal apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons. While it is known that they exert a…
To study information processing in the brain, neuroscientists manipulate experimental stimuli while recording participant brain activity. They can then use encoding models to find out which brain "zone" (e.g. which region of interest,…
Predictive coding (PC) is a general theory of cortical function. The local, gradient-based learning rules found in one kind of PC model have recently been shown to closely approximate backpropagation. This finding suggests that this…
Training data is always finite, making it unclear how to generalise to unseen situations. But, animals do generalise, wielding Occam's razor to select a parsimonious explanation of their observations. How they do this is called their…
As the proliferation of technology dramatically infiltrates all aspects of modern life, in many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with…
Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…
The brain's spatial orientation system uses different neuron ensembles to aid in environment-based navigation. Two of the ways brains encode spatial information is through head direction cells and grid cells. Brains use head direction cells…
Anatomic connections between brain areas affect information flow between neuronal circuits and the synchronization of neuronal activity. However, such structural connectivity does not coincide with effective connectivity, related to the…
One of the greatest research challenges of this century is to understand the neural basis for how behavior emerges in brain-body-environment systems. To this end, research has flourished along several directions but have predominantly…
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…
Persistent neural activity underlying working memory requires sustained synaptic transmission, yet the metabolic and neurotransmitter support provided by astrocyte networks is largely absent from spatially extended neural circuit models. We…