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Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean…
An increasing body of evidence suggests that the trial-to-trial variability of spiking activity in the brain is not mere noise, but rather the reflection of a sampling-based encoding scheme for probabilistic computing. Since the precise…
Recent advances in associative memory design through structured pattern sets and graph-based inference algorithms have allowed reliable learning and recall of an exponential number of patterns. Although these designs correct external errors…
An assembly is a large population of neurons whose synchronous firing is hypothesized to represent a memory, concept, word, and other cognitive categories. Assemblies are believed to provide a bridge between high-level cognitive phenomena…
Noise is an inherent part of neuronal dynamics, and thus of the brain. It can be observed in neuronal activity at different spatiotemporal scales, including in neuronal membrane potentials, local field potentials, electroencephalography,…
Recent advances in associative memory design through strutured pattern sets and graph-based inference algorithms have allowed the reliable learning and retrieval of an exponential number of patterns. Both these and classical associative…
Living systems implement and execute an extraordinary plethora of computational tasks. The inherent degree of large scale coordination emerges as a global property, from the intricate sea of microscopic interactions. The brain, with its…
Neural-network models of high-level brain functions such as memory recall and reasoning often rely on the presence of stochasticity. The majority of these models assumes that each neuron in the functional network is equipped with its own…
Animals rely on different decision strategies when faced with ambiguous or uncertain cues. Depending on the context, decisions may be biased towards events that were most frequently experienced in the past, or be more explorative. A…
The brain is a noisy system subject to energy constraints. These facts are rarely taken into account when modelling artificial neural networks. In this paper, we are interested in demonstrating that those factors can actually lead to the…
A steadily increasing body of evidence suggests that the brain performs probabilistic inference to interpret and respond to sensory input and that trial-to-trial variability in neural activity plays an important role. The neural sampling…
The highly irregular spiking activity of cortical neurons and behavioral variability suggest that the brain could operate in a fundamentally probabilistic way. Mimicking how the brain implements and learns probabilistic computation could be…
Music is a universal feature of human culture, linked to embodied cognitive functions that drive learning, action, and the emergence of creativity and individuality. Evidence highlights the critical role of statistical learning an implicit…
The brain is believed to implement probabilistic reasoning and to represent information via population, or distributed, coding. Most previous population-based probabilistic (PPC) theories share several basic properties: 1) continuous-valued…
$\textbf{Formal version available at}$ https://cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(23)00200-3 Networks of spiking neurons underpin the extraordinary information-processing capabilities of the brain and have become pillar models in…
Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…
Even as machine learning exceeds human-level performance on many applications, the generality, robustness, and rapidity of the brain's learning capabilities remain unmatched. How cognition arises from neural activity is a central open…
Neuronal responses are conspicuously variable. We focus on one particular aspect of that variability: the precision of action potential timing. We show that for common models of noisy spike generation, elementary considerations imply that…
Perceptions and actions, thoughts and memories result from coordinated activity in hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain. It is an old dream of the physics community to provide a statistical mechanics description for these and…
Varied sensory systems use noise in order to enhance detection of weak signals. It has been conjectured in the literature that this effect, known as stochastic resonance, may take place in central cognitive processes such as the memory…