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VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twindividuality2. Systems Neuroscience: Multiplex Networks and Critical Function Di Ieva, Antonio, et al. Fractals in the Neurosciences. Part I: General Principles. The Neuroscientist. 20/4, 2014. Brain researchers with posts in Canada, Austria, Spain, Poland and Venezuela offer a good review to date of realizations that nature’s ubiquitous recurrence of the same forms everywhere indeed also braces and graces our cerebral faculty, as it facilitates our constant cognitive activities. The natural complexity of the brain, its hierarchical structure, and the sophisticated topological architecture of the neurons organized in micro-networks and macro-networks are all factors that limit an Euclidean geometry and linear dynamics. The introduction of fractal geometry for the quantitative description of complex natural systems has been a major paradigm shift. Modern neurosciences admit the prevalence of fractal properties such as self-similarity in the brain at molecular, anatomic, functional, and pathological levels. Fractal geometry is a mathematical model that offers a universal language for neurons and glial cells as well as the whole brain with its physiopathological spectrums. For a holistic view of fractal geometry of the brain, we review here the basic concepts and main applications. (Abstract excerpts) Di Leva, Antonio, et al. Fractals in the Neurosciences. The Neuroscientist. 20/4, 2014. With Fabio Grizzi, Herbert Jelinek, Andras Pellionisz, and Gabriele Losa, theorists from Canada, Austria, Italy, Abu Dhabi, Australia, Switzerland and the USA who have previously proposed that such a topological “recursion” graces brain anatomy, physiology, and cognition since the 1990s here confirm its distinctive and effective presence. The natural complexity of the brain, its hierarchical structure, and the sophisticated topological architecture of the neurons organized in micronetworks and macronetworks are all factors contributing to the limits of the application of Euclidean geometry and linear dynamics to the neurosciences. The introduction of fractal geometry for the quantitative analysis and description of the geometric complexity of natural systems has been a major paradigm shift in the last decades. Nowadays, modern neurosciences admit the prevalence of fractal properties such as self-similarity in the brain at various levels of observation, from the microscale to the macroscale, in molecular, anatomic, functional, and pathological perspectives. Fractal geometry is a mathematical model that offers a universal language for the quantitative description of neurons and glial cells as well as the brain as a whole, with its complex three-dimensional structure, in all its physiopathological spectrums. For a holistic view of fractal geometry of the brain, we review here the basic concepts of fractal analysis and its main applications to the basic neurosciences. (Abstract) Dixon, James, et al. Multifractal Dynamics in the Emergence of Cognitive Structure. Topics in Cognitive Science. Online October, 2011. With John Holden, Daniel Mirman, and Damian Stephen, now at Harvard, further quantifications of how “cognition is characterized by seamless interactions among multiple scales of organization (e.g., chemical, physiological, and environmental).” The complex-systems approach to cognitive science seeks to move beyond the formalism of information exchange and to situate cognition within the broader formalism of energy flow. Changes in cognitive performance exhibit a fractal (i.e., power-law) relationship between size and time scale. These fractal fluctuations reflect the flow of energy at all scales governing cognition. Information transfer, as traditionally understood in the cognitive sciences, may be a subset of this multiscale energy flow. The cognitive system exhibits not just a single power-law relationship between fluctuation size and time scale but actually exhibits many power-law relationships, whether over time or space. (1) Doerig, Adrian, et al. The Neuroconnectionist Research Programme. arXiv:2209.03718. Some four decades after its 1980s origins, eleven senior scientists with postings in the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, and the USA including Jeann Ismael and Konrad Kording seek to advance this broad program into the 2020s as a proven method to explain the emergence of cognitive phenomena, behavior and neural data from bio-inspired, yet simple distributed coding principles. Over the years it has served beneficial usage in vision, audition, semantics, language, reading studies and brain coding principles. Our “planatural philosophia” is to appreciate its ascent to a global facility which has commenced to learn on her/his own, as newly sourced in a PedpaPedia Earthica edition. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) inspired by biology are now widely used to model behavioral and neural data, an approach we identify as neuroconnectionism. ANNs are good tor information process studies in the brain, but less so for cognitive functions. Here we take a philosophy of science view of a cohesive ANN research programme with a computational language for falsifiable theories about brain computation. By some timeline, we review past and present projects to conclude the neuroconnectionist approach is highly progressive, and can generate novel insights into our cerebral endeavors. (Abstract excerpt) Dogaru, Radu. Universality and Emergent Computation in Cellular Neural Networks. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific, 2003. A technical book on recurrent elemental cells that interact or “collaborate” in a nested fashion from which emerges an image or thought. In translation, what is again found is the universal creative system in its node and link, agent and relation (male and female) complementarity. A similar hierarchical and cellular organization is revealed in language, which could be considered as “image of our brains.” Basic cells (phonemes or characters in the written language) collaborate in an emergent manner to form words, which then are again combined in phrases and so on providing a structured reflection of the outer world. Donahoe, John and Vivian Packard Dorsel, eds. Neural-Networks Models of Cognition. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1997. Self-organizing neural nets guide brain development, plasticity, perception, stimuli responses, reinforcement learning, and complex behavior. Dresp-Langley, Birgitta. Seven Properties of Self-Organization in the Human Brain. Big Data and Cognitive Computing.. 4/2, 2020. In this MDPI online journal, a CNRS University of Strasbourg, France research director provides an extensive survey of how nature’s proclivity to organize itself so distinguishes our cerebral development and cognitive abilities. The principle of self-organization has become a significant part of the emerging field of computational philosophy. Self-organizing systems have been described in various domains in science and philosophy including physics, neuroscience, biology, medicine, ecology, and sociology. In regard, there are (at least) seven key properties of self-organization identified in brains: 1) modular connectivity, 2) unsupervised learning, 3) adaptive ability, 4) resiliency, 5) plasticity, 6) local-to-global arrangement, and 7) dynamic system growth. These are defined here via insights from neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience and Adaptive Resonance Theory (S. Grossberg), and from physics to show that self-organization achieves functional stability and plasticity with minimum complexity. (Abstract excerpt) Dumas, Guillaume, et al. Anatomical Connectivity Influences both Intra- and Inter-Brain Synchronizations. PLoS One. 7/5, 2013. As cited by Kelso, et al, 2013 herein, CNRS and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie Paris neuroscientists are able to quantify an extension of the internal coordination dynamics of a human brain to a dyad of interacting individuals. How much then, we ought to wonder, might our proximate and distant communications be taking upon the essence of a true social and global neurosphere. Recent development in diffusion spectrum brain imaging combined to functional simulation has the potential to further our understanding of how structure and dynamics are intertwined in the human brain. At the intra-individual scale, neurocomputational models have already started to uncover how the human connectome constrains the coordination of brain activity across distributed brain regions. In parallel, at the inter-individual scale, nascent social neuroscience provides a new dynamical vista of the coupling between two embodied cognitive agents. Using EEG hyperscanning to record simultaneously the brain activities of subjects during their ongoing interaction, we have previously demonstrated that behavioral synchrony correlates with the emergence of inter-brain synchronization. Here, we use a biophysical model to quantify to what extent inter-brain synchronizations are related to the anatomical and functional similarity of the two brains in interaction. Results show a potential dynamical property of the human connectome to facilitate inter-individual synchronizations and thus may partly account for our propensity to generate dynamical couplings with others. (Abstract) Effenberger, Felix, et al. The functional role of oscillatory dynamics in neocortical circuits: A computational perspective. PNAS. 122/4, 2025. Ernst Strüngmann Institute, Frankfurt neuroscientists including Wolf Singer achieve even more sophisticated evidence of critically poised, more or less order, diverse cerebral states which again reside at and attest to nature’s golden meanings. In addition, their certain method adds a byte digital and image analog reciprocity to the occasion which can serve AI methods.
Expert, Paul, et al. Self-Similar Correlation Function in Brain Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Online September 22, 2010. In contrast to 2011 Greg Paperin, et al (2011) in this journal who describe a generic complex system, this contribution explains its iconic presence in human cerebral function. A research team from Imperial College London and Northwestern University that includes Henrik Jensen, Kim Christensen, and Dante Chialvo, as a meld of statistical physics with nonlinear science via self-organized criticalities, report their findings of a spatial and temporal scale invariance across many neural realms. By so doing, as cited next, nature’s essential complementarity is once again revealed. Our brains are equally poised in a mutual balance of local concerns within a global context, the same yang and yin, me and we, entity and environment, as everywhere else. An important problem in neuroscience is to understand the mechanism by which the human brain’s 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses manage to produce this large repertoire of cortical configurations in a flexible manner. In addition, it is recognized that temporal correlations across such configurations cannot be arbitrary, but they need to meet two conflicting demands: while diverse cortical areas should remain functionally segregated from each other, they must still perform as a collective, i.e. they are functionally integrated. We show that this two-point correlation function extracted from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data exhibits self-similarity in space and time. In space, self-similarity is revealed by considering three successive spatial coarse-graining steps while in time it is revealed by the 1/f frequency behaviour of the power spectrum. The uncovered dynamical self-similarity implies that the brain is spontaneously at a continuously changing (in space and time) intermediate state between two extremes, one of excessive cortical integration and the other of complete segregation. (1) Fernando, Chrisantha, et al. Selectionist and Evolutionary Approaches to Brain Function. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. 6/Art. 24, 2012. With Eors Szathmary and Phil Husbands, another contribution that articulates the deep affinity of neural activities with life’s long iterative development. As Richard Watson, Hava Siegelmann, John Mayfield, Steven Frank, and increasing number contend, this achieves a 21st century appreciation of how “natural selection” actually applies. While a winnowing optimization toward “good enough to survive” goes on, the discovery of dynamic, learning-like, algorithms can now provide a prior genetic-like guidance. We consider approaches to brain dynamics and function that have been claimed to be Darwinian. These include Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection, Changeux’s theory of synaptic selection and selective stabilization of pre-representations, Seung’s Darwinian synapse, Loewenstein’s synaptic melioration, Adam’s selfish synapse, and Calvin’s replicating activity patterns. Except for the last two, the proposed mechanisms are selectionist but not truly Darwinian, because no replicators with information transfer to copies and hereditary variation can be identified in them. Bayesian models and reinforcement learning are formally in agreement with selection dynamics. A classification of search algorithms is shown to include Darwinian replicators (evolutionary units with multiplication, heredity, and variability) as the most powerful mechanism for search in a sparsely occupied search space. Finally, we review our recent attempts to construct and analyze simple models of true Darwinian evolutionary units in the brain in terms of connectivity and activity copying of neuronal groups. (Abstract) Fornito, Alex, et al. Bridging the Gap between Connectome and Transcriptome. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 23/1, 2019. Into the year 2019, advances such as imaging techniques and computational graphics allow Monash University, Australia clinical neuroscientists to discern spatial and temporal relations from DNA nucleotides to protein interactions via innate network paths. The wide use of –omic suffixes implies how important the genetic factors are in neural activity. The article glossary contains a Hierarchical Modularity term as another example of how nature’s universal complexity is so manifest in our own cerebral raiment. The recent construction of brain-wide gene expression atlases, which measure the transcriptional activity of thousands of genes in multiple anatomical locations, has made it possible to connect spatial variations in gene expression to distributed properties of connectome structure and function. These analyses have revealed that spatial patterning of gene expression and neuronal connectivity are closely linked, following broad spatial gradients that track regional variations in microcircuitry, inter-regional connectivity, and functional specialisation. Superimposed on these gradients are more specific associations between gene expression and connectome topology that appear conserved across diverse species and different resolution scales. (Abstract)
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