What do neuroscientists mean when they use the term representation? That’s part of what Luis Favela and Edouard Machery set out to answer a couple years ago by surveying lots of folks in the cognitive sciences, and they concluded that as a field the term is used in a confused and unclear way.
You may have heard of the critical brain hypothesis. It goes something like this: brain activity operates near a dynamical regime called criticality, poised at the sweet spot between too much order and too much chaos, and this is a good thing because systems at criticality are optimized for computing, they maximize information transfer, they maximize the time range over which they operate, and a handful of other good properties.
Rony Hirschhorn, Alex Lepauvre, and Oscar Ferrante on testing integrated information and global neuronal workspace theories of consciousness.
Dean Buonomano on time in neuroscience vs. physics, integrated information theory, testing timing dynamics in organotypic brain slices, and how AI doesn’t need neuroscience to continue to progress.
Aran Nayebi on NeuroAgents, reverse-engineering brains to build autonomous agents, and an update to the Turing test for NeuroAI.
