Related papers: Irreversible behavior drives neural flows in the h…
Sensory perception (e.g. vision) relies on a hierarchy of cortical areas, in which neural activity propagates in both directions, to convey information not only about sensory inputs but also about cognitive states, expectations and…
In the human brain, the allowed patterns of activity are constrained by the correlations between brain regions. Yet it remains unclear which correlations -- and how many -- are needed to predict large-scale neural activity. Here, we present…
Topological data analyses are rapidly turning into key tools for quantifying large volumes of neurobiological data, e.g., for organizing the spiking outputs of large neuronal ensembles and thus gaining insights into the information produced…
Humans and animals show remarkable flexibility in adjusting their behaviour when their goals, or rewards in the environment change. While such flexibility is a hallmark of intelligent behaviour, these multi-task scenarios remain an…
As animals interact with their environments, they must infer properties of their surroundings. Some animals, including humans, can represent uncertainty about those properties. But when, if ever, do they use probability distributions to…
Spiking activity from populations of neurons display causal interactions and memory effects. Therefore, they are expected to show some degree of irreversibility in time. Motivated by the spike train statistics, in this paper we build a…
Regime shifts in biology, ecology, and other complex systems are often interpreted through stability landscapes and early warning signals that implicitly assume dynamics without memory effects. Yet many real systems exhibit these effects,…
Animals can learn efficiently from a single experience and change their future behavior in response. However, in other instances, animals learn very slowly, requiring thousands of experiences. Here I survey tasks involving fast and slow…
The study of navigation behaviour and the associated brain dynamics have been a focus increasing research over the last decades. Coinciding with this has been an increased focus on a more ecological understanding of cognition. Here we…
The human brain can be considered to be a graphical structure comprising of tens of billions of biological neurons connected by synapses. It has the remarkable ability to automatically re-route information flow through alternate paths in…
Polymorphism in the peripheral sensory system (e.g., congenital individual differences in photopigment configuration) is important in diverse research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology to engineering, because of its potential…
Computational modeling plays an increasingly important role in neuroscience, highlighting the philosophical question of how computational models explain. In the context of neural network models for neuroscience, concerns have been raised…
Backpropagation (BP) has been pivotal in advancing machine learning and remains essential in computational applications and comparative studies of biological and artificial neural networks. Despite its widespread use, the implementation of…
As a person learns a new skill, distinct synapses, brain regions, and circuits are engaged and change over time. In this paper, we develop methods to examine patterns of correlated activity across a large set of brain regions. Our goal is…
This article presents a formal model demonstrating that genuine autonomy, the ability of a system to self-regulate and pursue objectives, fundamentally implies computational unpredictability from an external perspective. we establish…
A dynamical phase transition from reversible to irreversible behavior occurs when particle suspensions are subjected to uniform oscillatory shear, even in the Stokes flow limit. We consider a more general situation with non-uniform strain…
Reverse engineering the brain is proving difficult, perhaps impossible. While many believe that this is just a matter of time and effort, a different approach might help. Here, we describe a very simple idea which explains the power of the…
Anatomic connections between brain areas affect information flow between neuronal circuits and the synchronization of neuronal activity. However, such structural connectivity does not coincide with effective connectivity, related to the…
Continuous attractors have been used to understand recent neuroscience experiments where persistent activity patterns encode internal representations of external attributes like head direction or spatial location. However, the conditions…
To afford flexible behaviour, the brain must build internal representations that mirror the structure of variables in the external world. For example, 2D space obeys rules: the same set of actions combine in the same way everywhere (step…