Related papers: A hypothesis on the selective advantage for sleep
This paper develops a highly simplified model with which to analyze the phenomenon of sleep. Motivated by Crick's suggestion that sleep is the brain's way of ``taking out the trash,'' a suggestion that is supported by emerging evidence, we…
This paper presents a hypothesis that consciousness is a natural result of neurons that become connected recursively, and work synchronously between short and long term memories. Such neurons demonstrate qubit-like properties, each…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…
Advances in neural recording methods enable sampling from populations of thousands of neurons during the performance of behavioral tasks, raising the question of how recorded activity relates to the theoretical models of computations…
We offer a very simple model of how collective memory may form. Agents keep signalling within neighbourhoods, and depending on how many support each signal, some signals "win" in that neighbourhood. By agents interacting between different…
A number of studies have concluded that dreaming is mostly caused by randomly arriving internal signals because "dream contents are random impulses", and argued that dream sleep is unlikely to play an important part in our intellectual…
I propose that the need for sleep and the occurrence of dreams are intimately linked to the physical processes underlying the continuing replacement of cells and renewal of biomolecules during the lives of higher organisms. Since one major…
Visceral theory of sleep states that the same brain neurons, which process external information in wakefulness, during sleep switch to the processing of internal information coming from various visceral systems. Here we hypothesize that a…
In large neuronal networks, it is believed that functions emerge through the collective behavior of many interconnected neurons. Recently, the development of experimental techniques that allow simultaneous recording of calcium concentration…
In this work we identify the dormant neuron phenomenon in deep reinforcement learning, where an agent's network suffers from an increasing number of inactive neurons, thereby affecting network expressivity. We demonstrate the presence of…
Researchers puzzle over questions as to how rare species survive extinction, and why a significant proportion of microbial taxa are dormant. Computational simulation modeling by a genetic algorithm provides some answers. First, a…
We investigate a recently proposed model for cortical computation which performs relational inference. It consists of several interconnected, structurally equivalent populations of leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons, which are trained…
Sleep is one of the most noticeable and widespread phenomena occurring in multicellular animals. Nevertheless, no consensus for a theory of its origins has emerged. In particular, no explicit, quantitative theory exists that elucidates or…
Order can spontaneously emerge from seemingly noisy interactions between biological agents, like a flock of birds changing their direction of flight in unison, without a leader or an external cue. We are interested in the generic conditions…
Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex,…
Sleep behavior significantly impacts health and acts as an indicator of physical and mental well-being. Monitoring and predicting sleep behavior with ubiquitous sensors may therefore assist in both sleep management and tracking of related…
We propose a new self-organizing mechanism behind the emergence of memory in which temporal sequences of stimuli are transformed into spatial activity patterns. In particular, the memory emerges despite the absence of temporal correlations…
This paper argues that self-awareness is a learned behavior that emerges in organisms whose brains have a sufficiently integrated, complex ability for associative learning and memory. Continual sensory input of information related to the…
Cortical neurons are characterized by irregular firing and a broad distribution of rates. The balanced state model explains these observations with a cancellation of mean excitatory and inhibitory currents, which makes fluctuations drive…