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This might be the wrong crowd to ask, but I was wondering...
Do you ever ask yourself about how a series of action potentials at a celular level carry meaningful information about the world ?
From what I gather, a group of neurons and their respective potentials can carry the following bits of information:
Temporal: A neuron is at rest when nothing happens or the stimulus is too weak, and marks the moment in time by shooting a spike or potential when there is a worthy enough signal coming trough the wire.
hmmm...Thats it ??
I know there are other things potentials can do, potential frequency and amplitude might give you the perception of intensity, and then theres spatial perception, but that only happens when a bunch of neurons fire, so in a way temporal information already encompasses this 2 other bits of information.... At this point my brain starts to hurt.
Any ideas ?
K.
Do you ever ask yourself about how a series of action potentials at a celular level carry meaningful information about the world ?
From what I gather, a group of neurons and their respective potentials can carry the following bits of information:
Temporal: A neuron is at rest when nothing happens or the stimulus is too weak, and marks the moment in time by shooting a spike or potential when there is a worthy enough signal coming trough the wire.
hmmm...Thats it ??
I know there are other things potentials can do, potential frequency and amplitude might give you the perception of intensity, and then theres spatial perception, but that only happens when a bunch of neurons fire, so in a way temporal information already encompasses this 2 other bits of information.... At this point my brain starts to hurt.
Any ideas ?
K.
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Unsu...
Re: Potentials and information.
Mon, August 29, 2005 - 12:48 AMI think about this all the time. When I discover the answer, I will become a very famous man. In all seriousness though, this is one of the biggest questions in modern neuroscience: how do we go from action potentials to perception? The state of research has not yet given us any clues as of yet. -
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Unsu...
Re: Potentials and information.
Mon, August 29, 2005 - 8:08 AMYeah, I have to agree with this as well. I might even say that neural coding, the idea of how trains of action potentials carry information, is the most important question in neuroscience. It certainly is very important from a neural engineering perspective. I think the 'magic' may lie in the massive parallel processing, which is not something we have a very good handle on, at least experimentally.
If you're interested, two people I like that have made at least some progress in this field are Markus Meister at Harvard and Christof Koch at Caltech.
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Re: Potentials and information.
Fri, September 9, 2005 - 9:56 PM>how do we go from action potentials to perception?
IMHO, perception is mostly involuntary cognition. There would likely be something akin to it occurring on the purely neurological level, even without the perturbing effects of sensory data.
Does brain tissue in a petri dish 'think'? Perhaps, but it doesn't think 'about' anything, probably. -
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Unsu...
Re: Potentials and information.
Sun, September 11, 2005 - 8:55 PMJosh,
So I'm curious what you mean by 'involuntary cognition'? -
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Re: Potentials and information.
Tue, September 13, 2005 - 8:18 AMI mean that much of what people regard as 'perceptual' is post-perceptual.
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Re: Potentials and information.
Tue, October 24, 2006 - 4:26 PMYes, and the simplified non-spiking neural networks can do a lot too. It also relates to the question of, what can you do with a spiking neural network that you can't do with something like a feedforward network? There is more information than that in the network however, you have sensitization and habituation, where other changes in the shape of the spike can carry meaningful information.
Plus, there are a lot of complicated situations where neurons can be set up, like around inhibitory axon terminals. -
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Unsu...
Re: Potentials and information.
Wed, October 25, 2006 - 7:23 PMIn visual processing, 80% of the connections in the LGN (which is basically the gateway for nearly all visual information) are from higher cortical areas, providing feedback to modulate the incoming visual signal from the eyes. I think we may find these connections are more important in determining the quality of the perception than the actual stimulus. However, we have to be careful about how we define perception. Activation of retinal ganglion cells or even V1 cells does not lead to perception. There are, however, secondary waves of activity (in V1 at least) that do suggest awareness. I would hesitate to call this post-perception but I think that is the right idea.
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