Related papers: Do psychic cells generate consciousness?
Recent work has provided new insights into the temporal specialization of Intratelencephalic (IT) and Pyramidal tract neurons (PT). However, functional and anatomical differences of IT and PT have not been connected yet. This perspective…
One of the current AI issues depicted in popular culture is the fear of conscious super AIs that try to take control over humanity. And as computational power goes upwards and that turns more and more into a reality, understanding…
Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…
Grid cells play a principal role in enabling mammalian cognitive representations of ambient environments. The key property of these cells -- the regular arrangement of their firing fields -- is commonly viewed as means for establishing…
The neuronal circuit that controls obsessive and compulsive behaviors involves a complex network of brain regions (some with known involvement in reward processing). Among these are cortical regions, the striatum and the thalamus (which…
The physical basis of consciousness is one of the most intriguing open questions that contemporary science aims to solve. By approaching the brain as an interactive information system, complex network theory has greatly contributed to…
We seek general principles of the structure of the cellular collective activity associated with conscious awareness. Can we obtain evidence for features of the optimal brain organization that allows for adequate processing of stimuli and…
The evolution of the human mind through natural selection mandates that our conscious experiences are causally potent in order to leave a tangible impact upon the surrounding physical world. Any attempt to construct a functional theory of…
Neuropeptides, members of a large and evolutionarily ancient family of proteinaceous cell-cell signaling molecules, are widely recognized as extremely potent regulators of brain function and behavior. At the cellular level, neuropeptides…
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…
For modelling the location of pyramidal cells in the human cerebral cortex we suggest a hierarchical point process in $\mathbb{R}^3$ that exhibits anisotropy in the form of cylinders extending along the $z$-axis. The model consists first of…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
Consciousness is the window of the brain and reflects many fundamental cognitive properties involving both computational and cognitive mechanisms. A collection of these properties was described as the "easy problems" by Chalmers, including…
Despite great progress in neuroscience, there are still fundamental unanswered questions about the brain, including the origin of subjective experience and consciousness. Some answers might rely on new physical mechanisms. Given that…
The fundamental, powerful process of computation in the brain has been widely misunderstood. The paper [1] associates the general failure to build intelligent thinking machines with current reductionist principles of temporal coding and…
The fact that first-person conscious perceptions or sentient experiences have many bits of information strongly suggests that they are produced nonlocally by the effects of many atoms, say by nonlocal quantum operators. If these nonlocal…
We investigate cortical learning from the perspective of mechanism design. First, we show that discretizing standard models of neurons and synaptic plasticity leads to rational agents maximizing simple scoring rules. Second, our main result…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
Many studies have found evidence that the brain operates at a critical point, a processus known as self-organized criticality. A recent paper found remarkable scalings suggestive of criticality in systems as different as neural cultures,…
Neural circuits often face the problem of classifying stimuli into discrete groups and making decisions based on such classifications. Neurons of these circuits can be distinguished according to their correlations with different features of…