Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
March 2, 2017
Natika W Newton
How do we manage to understand a completely novel state of affairs, such as the sudden effects of an unexpected earthquake, or the arrival of a total stranger instead of the sister we were waiting for? In each case, for a moment we might be stunned, but we are able quite quickly to fit these events into our overall framework for understanding the world. However, terrified and despairing we...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
January 6, 2017
Jasmine A Berry, Alice C Parker
The successes of the artificial retina and cochlea have lent encouragement to researchers in the general field of brain augmentation (Gantz et al. , 2005; Dagnelie, 2012). However, in order for brain augmentation to progress beyond conventional sensory substitution to comprehensive augmentation of the human brain, we believe a better understanding of self-awareness and consciousness must be...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2017
Roger D Orpwood
This article argues that qualia are a likely outcome of the processing of information in local cortical networks. It uses an information-based approach and makes a distinction between information structures (the physical embodiment of information in the brain, primarily patterns of action potentials), and information messages (the meaning of those structures to the brain, and the basis of...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2017
Yi-Yuan Tang, Yan Tang, Rongxiang Tang et al.
Emerging evidences have shown that one form of mental training-mindfulness meditation, can improve attention, emotion regulation and cognitive performance through changing brain activity and structural connectivity. However, whether and how the short-term mindfulness meditation alters large-scale brain networks are not well understood. Here, we applied a novel data-driven technique, the...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2017
Vanessa Hadid, Franco Lepore
Homonymous hemianopia (HH) is the most common cortical visual impairment leading to blindness in the contralateral hemifield. It is associated with many inconveniences and daily restrictions such as exploration and visual orientation difficulties. However, patients with HH can preserve the remarkable ability to unconsciously perceive visual stimuli presented in their blindfield, a phenomenon...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
December 9, 2016
Yan M Yufik, Karl Friston
This article is motivated by a formulation of biotic self-organization in Friston (2013), where the emergence of "life" in coupled material entities (e.g., macromolecules) was predicated on bounded subsets that maintain a degree of statistical independence from the rest of the network. Boundary elements in such systems constitute a Markov blanket; separating the internal states of a system from...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
November 28, 2016
Paul J. Werbos, J. J. Joshua Davis
17 citations
This paper addresses two fundamental questions: (1) Is it possible to develop mathematical neural network models which can explain and replicate the way in which higher-order capabilities like intelligence, consciousness, optimization, and prediction emerge from the process of learning (Werbos, 1994, 2016a; National Science Foundation, 2008)? and (2) How can we use and test such models in a...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
July 1, 2016
Arto eAnnila
18 citations
The human brain is a particularly demanding system to infer its nature from observations. Thus, there is on one hand plenty of room for theorizing and on the other hand a pressing need for a rigorous theory. We apply statistical mechanics of open systems to describe the brain as a hierarchical system in consuming free energy in least time. This holistic tenet accounts for cellular metabolism,...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2016
John S Torday, William B Miller
Hobson and Friston have hypothesized that the brain must actively dissipate heat in order to process information (Hobson et al., 2014). This physiologic trait is functionally homologous with the first instantation of life formed by lipids suspended in water forming micelles- allowing the reduction in entropy (heat dissipation). This circumvents the Second Law of Thermodynamics permitting the...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
October 8, 2015
Shirley Telles, Nilkamal Singh, Acharya Balkrishna
These findings showed that different meditations are associated with distinct neural activity during sustained attention and processing emotions. Hence, meditation causes changes in parts of the brain and modifies brain activity, in distinct ways based on the meditation technique. To our knowledge no study has checked whether detachment and empathy can co-exist as a result of meditation; and...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
February 17, 2015
Singh Deepeshwar, Suhas Ashok Vinchurkar, Naveen Kalkuni Visweswaraiah et al.
Recent neuroimaging studies state that meditation increases regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The present study employed functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to evaluate the relative hemodynamic changes in PFC during a cognitive task. Twenty-two healthy male volunteers with ages between 18 and 30 years (group mean age ± SD; 22.9 ± 4.6 years) performed...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
November 25, 2014
Susan Pockett
Attempts to augment the function of the human brain inevitably involve in some way what Block (1995) calls phenomenal consciousness—bodily sensations and perceptual experiences—the redness of a strawberry, the smell of newly-baked bread. At present there is no consensus among scientists about what such sensory experiences are. This Opinion piece points out some problems with one of the major...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
June 1, 2011
W. Klemm
Brain activity differs in the various sleep stages and in conscious wakefulness. Awakening from sleep requires restoration of the complex nerve impulse patterns in neuronal network assemblies necessary to re-create and sustain conscious wakefulness. Herein I propose that the brain uses rapid eye movement (REM) to help wake itself up after it has had a sufficient amount of sleep. Evidence...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2010
Annalaura Lagioia, Dimitri van de Ville, Martin Debbané et al.
The rising interest in temporally coherent brain networks during baseline adult cerebral activity finds convergent evidence for an identifiable set of resting state networks (RSNs). To date, little is know concerning the earlier developmental stages of functional connectivity in RSNs. This study's main objective is to characterize the RSNs in a sample of adolescents. We further examine our data...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2009
Michael C. Quirk, Dara L Sosulski, Claudia E Feierstein et al.
Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a region of prefrontal cortex implicated in the motivational control of behavior and in related abnormalities seen in psychosis and depression. It has been hypothesized that a critical mechanism in these disorders is the dysfunction of GABAergic interneurons that normally regulate prefrontal information processing. Here, we studied a subclass of interneurons...