Related papers: Thinking about the brain
The informational synthesis of neural structures, processes, parameters and characteristics that allow a unified description and modeling as neural machines of natural and artificial neural systems is presented. The general informational…
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,…
Biological networks exhibit complex, coordinated patterns of activity. Can these patterns be captured precisely in simple models? Here we use measurements of simultaneous activity in 1000+ neurons in the mouse brain to test the validity of…
Brain science and artificial intelligence have made great progress toward the understanding and engineering of the human mind. The progress has accelerated significantly since the turn of the century thanks to new methods for probing the…
Why do neurons encode information the way they do? Normative answers to this question model neural activity as the solution to an optimisation problem; for example, the celebrated efficient coding hypothesis frames neural activity as the…
Functional networks representing human brain dynamics have become a standard tool in neuroscience, providing an accessible way of depicting the computation performed by the brain in healthy and pathological conditions. Yet, these networks…
Advancing our knowledge of how the brain processes information remains a key challenge in neuroscience. This thesis combines three different approaches to the study of the dynamics of neural networks and their encoding representations: a…
The last decades saw dramatic progress in brain research. These advances were often buttressed by probing single variables to make circumscribed discoveries, typically through null hypothesis significance testing. New ways for generating…
This explanation of what a brain is and does rests on informational first principles, because information theory, like its parent theory thermodynamics, is mathematically sacrosanct, itself resting on real-valued probability.Just as…
The ability to effectively control brain dynamics holds great promise for the enhancement of cognitive function in humans, and the betterment of their quality of life. Yet, successfully controlling dynamics in neural systems is challenging,…
Adaptive behavior is mainly the result of adaptive brains. We go a step beyond and claim that the brain does not only adapt to its surrounding reality but rather, it builds itself up to constructs its own reality. That is, rather than just…
Modern discriminative predictors have been shown to match natural intelligences in specific perceptual tasks in image classification, object and part detection, boundary extraction, etc. However, a major advantage that natural intelligences…
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…
When artificial neural networks have demonstrated exceptional practical success in a variety of domains, investigations into their theoretical characteristics, such as their approximation power, statistical properties, and generalization…
Synaptic plasticity allows cortical circuits to learn new tasks and to adapt to changing environments. How do cortical circuits use plasticity to acquire functions such as decision-making or working memory? Neurons are connected in complex…
Recent experiments have highlighted how collective dynamics in networks of brain regions affect behavior and cognitive function. In this paper we show that a simple, homogeneous system of densely connected oscillators representing the…
A fundamental question in neuroscience is how structure and function of neural systems are related. We study this interplay by combining a familiar auto-associative neural network with an evolving mechanism for the birth and death of…
Memory is often defined as the mental capacity of retaining information about facts, events, procedures and more generally about any type of previous experience. Memories are remembered as long as they influence our thoughts, feelings, and…
Cognitive processes in the brain, like learning, formation of memory, recovery of memorized images, classification of objects have two features: First, there is no supervisor in the brain who controls these processes. Second there is a hugh…
Various research initiatives try to utilize the operational principles of organisms and brains to develop alternative, biologically inspired computing paradigms and artificial cognitive systems. This paper reviews key features of the…