Related papers: A hypothesis on the selective advantage for sleep

In the present article, we investigate the effects of dormancy on an abstract population genetic level. We first provide a short review of seed bank models in population genetics, and the role of dormancy for the interplay of evolutionary…

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…

Many real-world complex systems rely on cluster synchronization to function properly. A cluster of nodes exhibits synchronous behavior while others behave erratically. Predicting the emergence of these clusters and understanding the…

Sleep is considered to play an essential role in memory reorganization. Despite its importance, classical theoretical models did not focus on some sleep characteristics. Here, we review recent theoretical approaches investigating their…

The gap between the huge volumes of data needed to train artificial neural networks and the relatively small amount of data needed by their biological counterparts is a central puzzle in machine learning. Here, inspired by biological…

Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…

The spontaneous generation of electrical activity underpins a number of essential physiological processes, and is observed even in tissues where specialized pacemaker cells have not been identified. The emergence of periodic oscillations in…

Sleep is crucial for daytime functioning, cognitive performance and general well-being. These aspects of daily life are known to be impaired after extended wake, yet, the underlying neuronal correlates have been difficult to identify.…

Networks in nature do not act in isolation but instead exchange information, and depend on each other to function properly. An incipient theory of Networks of Networks have shown that connected random networks may very easily result in…

Sleep is characterized by non-rapid eye movement (nREM) sleep, originating from widespread neuronal synchrony, and REM sleep, with neuronal desynchronization akin to waking behavior. While these were thought to be global brain states,…

We develop a general theory of synaptic neural balance and how it can emerge or be enforced in neural networks. For a given regularizer, a neuron is said to be in balance if the total cost of its input weights is equal to the total cost of…

Several guiding principles for thought processes are proposed and a neural-network-type model implementing these principles is presented and studied. We suggest to consider thinking within an associative network built-up of overlapping…

Dynamical balance of excitation and inhibition is usually invoked to explain the irregular low firing activity observed in the cortex. We propose a robust nonlinear balancing mechanism for a random network of spiking neurons, which works…

A new approach for the description of phenomena of social aggregation is suggested. On the basis of psychological concepts (as for instance social norms and cultural coordinates), we deduce a general mechanism for the social aggregation in…

Populations of agents often exhibit surprising collective behavior emerging from simple local interactions. The common belief is that the agents must posses a certain level of cognitive abilities for such an emerging collective behavior to…

We investigate the dynamics of a network consisting of an array of identical cortical units with nearest neighbor interactions under periodic arousal. Each unit consists of two interconnected populations of neurons tuned to a state in which…

Evidence accumulation models of simple decision-making have long assumed that the brain estimates a scalar decision variable corresponding to the log-likelihood ratio of the two alternatives. Typical neural implementations of this…

As proposed by Hebb's theory, neural assemblies are groups of excitatory neurons that fire synchronously and exhibit high synaptic density, representing external stimuli and supporting cognitive functions such as language and…

The behavior of the network and its stability are governed by both dynamics of individual nodes as well as their topological interconnections. Attention mechanism as an integral part of neural network models was initially designed for…

It is commonly observed that deep networks trained for classification exhibit class-selective neurons in their early and intermediate layers. Intriguingly, recent studies have shown that these class-selective neurons can be ablated without…