Related papers: Time, control, and the nervous system

A coupled map is suggested to investigate various spatial or temporal designs in biology: Several cells (or tissues) in an organ are considered as connected to each other in terms of some molecular diffusions or electrical potential…

Control theory arose from a need to control synthetic systems. From regulating steam engines to tuning radios to devices capable of autonomous movement, it provided a formal mathematical basis for understanding the role of feedback in the…

Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…

A notion of time is fundamental in the study of dynamical systems. Time arises as a standalone dynamical system and also in solutions or trajectories as a special kind of map between systems. We characterize time by a universal property and…

Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It permits it to predict regular events, and prepare for them on time. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we…

Animals and humans make decisions based on their expected outcomes. Since relevant outcomes are often delayed, perceiving delays and choosing between earlier versus later rewards (intertemporal decision-making) is an essential component of…

Time is deeply woven into how people perceive, and communicate about the world. Almost unconsciously, we provide our language utterances with temporal cues, like verb tenses, and we can hardly produce sentences without such cues. Extracting…

We propose a model of processing of information in the brain which has the following distinguishing features: a). It is quantum-like (QL). The brain uses the quantum rule (given by von Neumann trace formula) for calculation of averages for…

Temporal sampling does more than add another axis to the vector of observables. Instead, under the recognition that how objects change (and move) in time speaks directly to the physics underlying astronomical phenomena, next-generation…

This paper introduces a new behavioral system model with distinct external and internal signals possibly evolving on different time scales. This allows to capture abstraction processes or signal aggregation in the context of control and…

The temporal activity of many biological systems, including neural circuits, exhibits fluctuations simultaneously varying over a large range of timescales. The mechanisms leading to this temporal heterogeneity are yet unknown. Here we show…

We suggest a mechanism based on spike time dependent plasticity (STDP) of synapses to store, retrieve and predict temporal sequences. The mechanism is demonstrated in a model system of simplified integrate-and-fire type neurons densely…

We present a solution to the problem of understanding a system that produces a sequence of temporally ordered observations. Our solution is based on generating and interpreting a set of temporal decision rules. A temporal decision rule is a…

The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative behavioural definition of computation (and of a computer) based simply on whether a system is capable of reacting to the environment-the input-as reflected in a measure of programmability.…

We review the idea, due to Einstein, Eddington, Hoyle and Ballard, that time is a subjective label, whose primary purpose is to order events, perhaps in a higher-dimensional universe. In this approach, all moments in time exist…

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…

In the paper, elements of the system theory of time are presented, mathematical models for time are constructed, and various properties are deduced from the main principles of the system theory of time. This theory is a far-reaching…

The increasing relevance of areas such as real-time and embedded systems, pervasive computing, hybrid systems control, and biological and social systems modeling is bringing a growing attention to the temporal aspects of computing, not only…

Agents acting in the natural world aim at selecting appropriate actions based on noisy and partial sensory observations. Many behaviors leading to decision mak- ing and action selection in a closed loop setting are naturally phrased within…

The concept of time mostly plays a subordinate role in finance and economics. The assumption is that time flows continuously and that time series data should be analyzed at regular, equidistant intervals. Nonetheless, already nearly 60…