Related papers: Do psychic cells generate consciousness?
One of the central aims of neuroscience is to reliably predict the behavioral response of an organism using its neural activity. If possible, this implies we can causally manipulate the neural response and design brain-computer-interface…
Consciousness is notoriously hard to define with objective terms. An objective definition of consciousness is critically needed so that we might accurately understand how consciousness and resultant choice behaviour may arise in biological…
Minimization of cortical prediction errors has been considered a key computational goal of the cerebral cortex underlying perception, action and learning. However, it is still unclear how the cortex should form and use information about…
In many scenarios, human decisions are explained based on some high-level concepts. In this work, we take a step in the interpretability of neural networks by examining their internal representation or neuron's activations against concepts.…
This is a follow-up tutorial article of [17] and [16], in this paper, we will introduce several important cognitive functions of the brain. Brain cognitive functions are the mental processes that allow us to receive, select, store,…
Perhaps the most important question posed by brain research is: How the brain gives rise to the mind. To answer this question, we have primarily relied on the connectionist paradigm: The brain's entire knowledge and thinking skills are…
This paper presents a highly speculative model encompassing the cortex, thalamus, and hippocampus of the mammalian brain. While the majority of computational neuroscience models are founded upon empirical evidence, this model is predicated…
Although lagging behind classical computational neuroscience, theoretical and computational approaches are beginning to emerge to characterize different aspects of neuron-glial interactions. This chapter aims to provide essential knowledge…
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has been used in developing unconventional computing devices for in which the slime mould played a role of a sensing, actuating, and computing device. These devices treated the slime mould rather as an…
As a follow-up tutorial article of [29], in this paper, we will introduce the basic compositional units of the human brain, which will further illustrate the cell-level bio-structure of the brain. On average, the human brain contains about…
Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a…
The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of…
Spatial learning across many species is impaired by lesions in the hippocampus, a subcortical brain structure whose cellular composition changes substantially over its 5 to 6 week lifetime from mainly excitatory neurons during development…
Neurons communicate with downstream systems via sparse and incredibly brief electrical pulses, or spikes. Using these events, they control various targets such as neuromuscular units, neurosecretory systems, and other neurons in connected…
This paper examines the phenomenon of daydreaming: spontaneously recalling or imagining personal or vicarious experiences in the past or future. The following important roles of daydreaming in human cognition are postulated: plan…
It is widely believed that the particular wiring observed within cortical columns boosts neural computation. We use rewiring of neural networks performing real-world cognitive tasks to study the validity of this argument. In a vast survey…
The brain is organized in a modular way, serving multiple functionalities. This multiplicity requires that both positive (e.g. excitatory, phase-coherent) and negative (e.g. inhibitory, phase-opposing) interactions take place across brain…
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…
In our understanding, a mind-map is an adaptive engine that basically works incrementally on the fundament of existing transactional streams. Generally, mind-maps consist of symbolic cells that are connected with each other and that become…
Hippocampal place and time cells encode spatial and temporal aspects of experience. Both have the same neural substrate, but have been modeled as having different functions and mechanistic origins, place cells as continuous attractors, and…