Related papers: A Causal Formulation of Spike-Wave Duality
The cognitive frame in which most neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior is conducted contains the assumption that brain mechanisms per se fully suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This…
Whether, when, and how causal interactions between neurons can be meaningfully studied from observations of neural activity alone are vital questions in neural data analysis. Here we aim to better outline the concept of functional…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
We show that it is possible to understand and identify a decision maker's subjective causal judgements by observing her preferences over interventions. Following Pearl [2000], we represent causality using causal models (also called…
Inferring the potential consequences of an unobserved event is a fundamental scientific question. To this end, Pearl's celebrated do-calculus provides a set of inference rules to derive an interventional probability from an observational…
While probabilistic models describe the dependence structure between observed variables, causal models go one step further: they predict, for example, how cognitive functions are affected by external interventions that perturb neuronal…
Information flow provides a natural measure for the causal interaction between dynamical events. This study extends our previous rigorous formalism of componentwise information flow to the bulk information flow between two complex…
At the heart of causal structure learning from observational data lies a deceivingly simple question: given two statistically dependent random variables, which one has a causal effect on the other? This is impossible to answer using…
A textbook interpretation of quantum physics is that quantum objects can be described in a particle or a wave picture, depending on the operations and measurements performed. Beyond this widely held believe, we demonstrate in this…
Neuroscientists have worked on the problem of estimating synaptic properties, such as connectivity and strength, from simultaneously recorded spike trains since the 1960s. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the problem, coinciding…
Correlations are employed in modern physics to explain microscopic and macroscopic phenomena, like the fractional quantum Hall effect and the Mott insulator state in high temperature superconductors and ultracold atoms. Simultaneously…
There has been a substantial amount of research on the relationship between hippocampal neurogenesis and behaviour over the past fifteen years, but the causal role that new neurons have on cognitive and affective behavioural tasks is still…
An essential step toward understanding neural circuits is linking their structure and their dynamics. In general, this relationship can be almost arbitrarily complex. Recent theoretical work has, however, begun to identify some broad…
Our current understanding of brain rhythms is based on quantifying their instantaneous or time-averaged characteristics. What remains unexplored, is the actual structure of the waves -- their shapes and patterns over finite timescales. To…
In this paper, I examine what I refer to as the spike doctrine, which is the generally held belief in neuroscience that information in the brain is encoded by sequences of neural action potentials. I present the argument that specific…
The problem of neural coding is to understand how sequences of action potentials (spikes) are related to sensory stimuli, motor outputs, or (ultimately) thoughts and intentions. One clear question is whether the same coding rules are used…
Modern Artificial Intelligence achieves remarkable predictive power by optimizing statistical risk functionals over vast corpora. Yet a gap separates this from genuine intelligence: the inability to distinguish correlation from causation.…
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…
Dale's Principle has historically guided neuroscience research as a valuable rule of thumb, namely that all synapses on each neuron release the same set of neurotransmitters. Most existing Spiking Neuron Network models share this…
A key question in neuroscience is at which level functional meaning emerges from biophysical phenomena. In most vertebrate systems, precise functions are assigned at the level of neural populations, while single-neurons are deemed…