Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life is a famous book that people point to as having predicted DNA and influenced and inspired many well-known biologists ushering in the molecular biology revolution. But Schrödinger was a physicist, not a biologist, and he spent very little time and effort toward understanding biology.
Raja discusses his philosophical and scientific work assessing how concepts from ecological psychology might elucidate the brain’s role in perception and action, within the context of our inextricable embodiment and interaction with the environment. They also discuss Raja’s term “motif” to describe how a single term can enable scientific progress even when researchers use different definitions for the same words, and the ongoing research studying the nature of plant behavior.
This book is about essences across spatial scales in nature. More precisely, it’s about giving names to what is fundamental, or essential, to how things and processes function in nature. Niko argues those essences are where meaning resides.
Ann Kennedy is Associate Professor at Scripps Research Institute and runs the Laboratory for Theoretical Neuroscience and Behavior.
What changes and what stays the same as you scale from single neurons up to local populations of neurons up to whole brains? How tuning parameters like the gain in some neural populations affects the dynamical and computational properties of the rest of the system.
