Related papers: Thinking about the brain
Even as machine learning exceeds human-level performance on many applications, the generality, robustness, and rapidity of the brain's learning capabilities remain unmatched. How cognition arises from neural activity is a central open…
Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean…
Despite differences in brain sizes and cognitive niches among mammals, their cerebral cortices posses many common features and regularities. These regularities have been a subject of experimental investigation in neuroanatomy for the last…
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…
We have a lot of relation to the encoding and the Theory of Information, when considering thinking. This is a natural process and, at once, the complex thing we investigate. This always was a challenge - to understand how our mind works,…
We discuss philosophical issues concerning the notion of cognition basing ourselves in experimental results in cognitive sciences, especially in computer simulations of cognitive systems. There have been debates on the "proper" approach for…
Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in dynamic environments, and it is unclear how our brains actively reformat this dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. Experimental neuroscience is undergoing a…
The extraordinary computational power of the brain may be related in part to the fact that each of the smaller neural networks that compose it can behave transiently in many different ways, depending on its inputs. Mathematically, input…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
Unlike robots, humans learn, adapt and perceive their bodies by interacting with the world. Discovering how the brain represents the body and generates actions is of major importance for robotics and artificial intelligence. Here we discuss…
A pervasive research protocol of cognitive neuroscience is to train subjects to perform deliberately designed experiments and record brain activity simultaneously, aiming to understand the brain mechanism underlying cognition. However, how…
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…
Even though the brain operates in pure darkness, within the skull, it can infer the most likely causes of its sensory input. An approach to modelling this inference is to assume that the brain has a generative model of the world, which it…
Complexity and limited ability have profound effect on how we learn and make decisions under uncertainty. Using the theory of finite automaton to model belief formation, this paper studies the characteristics of optimal learning behavior in…
Cognitive neuroscience is enjoying rapid increase in extensive public brain-imaging datasets. It opens the door to large-scale statistical models. Finding a unified perspective for all available data calls for scalable and automated…
The functioning of an organ such as the brain emerges from interactions between its constituent parts. Further, this interaction is not immutable in time but rather unfolds in a succession of patterns, thereby allowing the brain to adapt to…
Does the brain construct an efficient representation of the sensory world? We review progress on this question, focusing on a series of experiments in the last decade which use fly vision as a model system in which theory and experiment can…
On the surface, behavioural science and physics seem to be two disparate fields of research. However, a closer examination of problems solved by them reveals that they are uniquely related to one another. Exemplified by the theories of…
Music is a universal feature of human culture, linked to embodied cognitive functions that drive learning, action, and the emergence of creativity and individuality. Evidence highlights the critical role of statistical learning an implicit…
Trying to be effective (no matter who exactly and in what field) a person face the problem which inevitably destroys all our attempts to easily get to a desired goal. The problem is the existence of some insuperable barriers for our mind,…