Related papers: Has the Brain Maximized its Information Storage Ca…

A pressing scientific challenge is to understand how brains work. Of particular interest is the neocortex,the part of the brain that is especially large in humans, capable of handling a wide variety of tasks including visual, auditory,…

There is evidence that biological synapses have only a fixed number of discrete weight states. Memory storage with such synapses behaves quite differently from synapses with unbounded, continuous weights as old memories are automatically…

We propose a working hypothesis supported by numerical simulations that brain networks evolve based on the principle of the maximization of their internal information flow capacity. We find that synchronous behavior and capacity of…

Understanding the limits imposed on information storage capacity of physical systems is a problem of fundamental and practical importance which bridges physics and information science. There is a well-known upper bound on the amount of…

The cerebrum of mammals spans a vast range of sizes and yet has a very regular structure. The amount of folding of the cortical surface and the proportion of white matter gradually increase with size, but the underlying mechanisms remain…

The human brain has immense learning capabilities at extreme energy efficiencies and scale that no artificial system has been able to match. For decades, reverse engineering the brain has been one of the top priorities of science and…

Deep learning has seen remarkable developments over the last years, many of them inspired by neuroscience. However, the main learning mechanism behind these advances - error backpropagation - appears to be at odds with neurobiology. Here,…

A sufficiently large information flux in recurrent neural networks, quantified by the mutual information between successive network states, is considered a prerequisite for rich information processing capabilities. This raises the question…

Many cortical areas increase in size considerably during postnatal development, progressively displacing neuronal cell bodies from each other. At present, little is known about how cortical growth affects the development of neuronal…

The structure of the axon-dendrite connections of neurons of the brain creates a rich spatial structure in which provided various combinations of signals surrounding neurons. Structure of dendritic trees and shape of dendritic spines allow…

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…

The neural network is a powerful computing framework that has been exploited by biological evolution and by humans for solving diverse problems. Although the computational capabilities of neural networks are determined by their structure,…

We investigate a mutual relationship between information and energy during early phase of LTP induction and maintenance in a large-scale system of mutually coupled dendritic spines, with discrete internal states and probabilistic dynamics,…

We investigate cortical learning from the perspective of mechanism design. First, we show that discretizing standard models of neurons and synaptic plasticity leads to rational agents maximizing simple scoring rules. Second, our main result…

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…

Present day computers expend orders of magnitude more computational resources to perform various cognitive and perception related tasks that humans routinely perform everyday. This has recently resulted in a seismic shift in the field of…

Characterizing the relation between weight structure and input/output statistics is fundamental for understanding the computational capabilities of neural circuits. In this work, I study the problem of storing associations between analog…

Learning in the brain requires complementary mechanisms: potentiation and activity-dependent homeostatic scaling. We introduce synaptic scaling to a biologically-realistic spiking model of neocortex which can learn changes in oscillatory…

The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…

In this work we study, analytically and employing Monte Carlo simulations, the influence of the competition between several activity-dependent synaptic processes, such as short-term synaptic facilitation and depression, on the maximum…