Philosophia Scientiæ
January 19, 2026
Edmund T Rolls
3 citations
In this paper I show that computational neuroscience provides an important new approach to traditional problems in philosophy such as the relation between mental states and brain states (the mind-body or mind-brain problem), to determinism and free will, and helps one with the ‘hard’ problem, the phenomenal aspects of consciousness.One of the themes of the paper and of my book Neuroculture: on...
Brain Sciences
May 16, 2025
Edmund T Rolls
7 citations
A unified theory of emotion and motivation is updated in which motivational states are states in which instrumental goal-directed actions are performed to obtain anticipated rewards or avoid punishers, and emotional states are states that are elicited when the (conditioned or unconditioned) instrumental reward or punisher is or is not received. This advances our understanding of emotion and...
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
2021
Edmund T Rolls
19 citations
The relation between mental states and brain states is important in computational neuroscience, and in psychiatry in which interventions with medication are made on brain states to alter mental states. The relation between the brain and the mind has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Here a neuroscience approach is proposed in which events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network...
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
2021
Edmund T Rolls
17 citations
A neuroscience-based approach has recently been proposed for the relation between the mind and the brain. The proposal is that events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network levels take place simultaneously to perform a computation that can be described at a high level as a mental state, with content about the world. It is argued that as the processes at the different levels of...
Frontiers in Psychology
2020
Edmund T Rolls
43 citations
Problems are raised with the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness, for example about exactly how global the workspace needs to be for consciousness to suddenly be present. Problems are also raised with Carruthers's (2019) version that excludes conceptual (categorical or discrete) representations, and in which phenomenal consciousness can be reduced to physical processes, with instead a...
December 31, 2010
Edmund T Rolls
53 citations
AbstractComputational processes that are closely related to conscious processing and reasoning are described. Evidence is reviewed that there are two routes to action, the explicit, conscious, one involving reasoning, and an implicit, unconscious route for well-learned actions to obtain goals. Then a higher order syntactic thought (HOST) computational theory of consciousness is described. It is...
Advances in Consciousness Research
October 28, 2010
Edmund T Rolls
Noise caused by randomness in the spiking times of neurons in the brain has a number of advantages, including contributing to probabilistic decision-making. However, noise results in the brain operating effectively as a non-deterministic system, which has implications for free will. Noise also results in decisions being taken probabilistically between the reasoning system and the implicit...
PLoS Computational Biology
November 7, 2007
Marco Loh, Edmund T Rolls, Gustavo Deco
172 citations
We propose a top-down approach to the symptoms of schizophrenia based on a statistical dynamical framework. We show that a reduced depth in the basins of attraction of cortical attractor states destabilizes the activity at the network level due to the constant statistical fluctuations caused by the stochastic spiking of neurons. In integrate-and-fire network simulations, a decrease in the NMDA...
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
November 1, 2007
Edmund T Rolls
Simultaneous recordings from populations of neurons in the inferior temporal visual cortex show that most of the information about which stimulus was shown is available in the number of spikes (or firing rate) of each neuron, and not from stimulus-dependent synchrony, so that it is unlikely that stimulus-dependent synchrony (or indeed oscillations) is an essential aspect of visual object...
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
October 1, 1997
Edmund T. Rolls
A combined neurophysiological and computational approach is reviewed that leads to a proposal for how neural networks in the temporal cortical visual areas of primates could function to produce invariant object representation and identification. A similar approach is then reviewed which leads to a theory of how the hippocampus could rapidly store memories, especially episodic memories including...