Brain complexity:multidimensional areas in neocortex (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 13, 2017, 17:45 (2720 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID’s comment: note my bold: not by chance. Neo-cortex is the most evolved. It is part of the continuous enlargement of the brain which allows the most complex concepts to be developed, after primary enlargement has occurred. Size first, use second.

dhw: I agree that it’s not by chance. These cell communities seem to know what they’re doing. Maybe God set up the whole mechanism. Note my bold: what these researchers are examining are the complexities. Nothing to do with expansion, which ceased 200,000 years ago and is now slowly being reversed by shrinkage. Since rewiring (even if only in the form of temporary “sandcastles”) is the result of conceptualization, once again the process is concept followed by rewiring followed by “use”, i.e. making concepts into reality.

I would state it slightly differently. These neurons are programmed to respond this way. It has to be designed programming. Only a designing mind can do this, therefore God.

The complexity of the brain's reactive ability is staggering. The original article:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full#h4

"Since the reconstructions are stochastic instantiations at a specific age of the neocortex, they do not take into account rewiring driven by plasticity during development and learning. Rewiring is readily triggered by stimuli as well as spontaneous activity (Le Be and Markram, 2006), which leads to a higher degree of organization (Chklovskii et al., 2004; Holtmaat and Svoboda, 2009) that is likely to increase the number of cliques. The difference may also partly be due to incomplete axonal reconstructions that would lead to lower connectivity, but such an effect would be minor because the connection rate between the specific neurons recorded for this comparison is reasonably well constrained (Reimann et al., 2015).

"The digital reconstruction does not take into account intracortical connections beyond the microcircuit. The increase in correlations between neurons with the number of cliques to which they belong should be unaffected when these connections are taken into account because the overall correlation between neurons saturates already for a microcircuit of the size considered in this study, as we have previously shown (Markram et al., 2015). However, the time course of responses to stimuli and hence the specific shape of trajectories may be affected by the neighboring tissue.

"In conclusion, this study suggests that neocortical microcircuits process information through a stereotypical progression of clique and cavity formation and disintegration, consistent with a recent hypothesis of common strategies for information processing across the neocortex. We conjecture that a stimulus may be processed by binding neurons into cliques of increasingly higher dimension, as a specific class of cell assemblies, possibly to represent features of the stimulus, and by binding these cliques into cavities of increasing complexity, possibly to represent the associations between the features of the stimulus (Hebb, 1949; Braitenberg, 1978), and by binding these cliques into cavities of increasing complexity, possibly to represent the associations between the features of the stimulus (Hebb, 1949; Braitenberg, 1978), and by binding these cliques into cavities of increasing complexity, possibly to represent the associations between the features."

Comment: this is just a preliminary study into brain complexity. When it is recognized that this is the pinnacle of evolutionary complexity, it must be recognized that this is a preliminary goal of evolution. And as you admit it is not be chance, only a designing God is left as the cause. The brain is programmed to adapt to use as you describe. Size first use second, obviously.