Ehud Ahissar is a professor in the Department of Brain Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Years of studying how rodents actively sense their environment through whisking has led Ahissar to propose a dualistic framework for consciousness. He suggests we communicate with others (and ourselves) through a non-physical digital process, while we experience the world through a physical analog process. These two processing modes map onto complementary opposing hierarchical loops of brain circuitry.
rains encode information in representations that perform computations to make predictions, right? No, no, no, and no. That’s Romain Brette’s response to those ill-conceived notions that neuroscience relies on to try to explain how cognition works. He uses more words to do that in his new book, The Brain, in Theory, which we discuss today.
Should we think of our brains as collections of neural population manifolds? Gallego suggests a wealth of evidence supports the view that neural manifolds are real and useful, even if they may not completely solve the age-old mind-body problem.
