IMR Press / FBL / Volume 17 / Issue 2 / DOI: 10.2741/3946

Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Review
Brain at work: time, sparseness and superposition principles
Show Less
1 Dept of Sciences biologiques, University of Montreal Qc H3C 3J7, Canada
2 NECOTIS, Dept of electrical and computer engineering, University of Sherbrooke, J1K 2R1, Canada
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2012, 17(2), 583–606; https://doi.org/10.2741/3946
Published: 1 January 2012
Abstract

Many studies explored mechanisms through which the brain encodes sensory inputs allowing a coherent behavior. The brain could identify stimuli via a hierarchical stream of activity leading to a cardinal neuron responsive to one particular object. The opportunity to record from numerous neurons offered investigators the capability of examining simultaneously the functioning of many cells. These approaches suggested encoding processes that are parallel rather than serial. Binding the many features of a stimulus may be accomplished through an induced synchronization of cell's action potentials. These interpretations are supported by experimental data and offer many advantages but also several shortcomings. We argue for a coding mechanism based on a sparse synchronization paradigm. We show that synchronization of spikes is a fast and efficient mode to encode the representation of objects based on feature bindings. We introduce the view that sparse synchronization coding presents an interesting venue in probing brain encoding mechanisms as it allows the functional establishment of multi-layered and time-conditioned neuronal networks or multislice networks. We propose a model based on integrate-and-fire spiking neurons.

Keywords
Neuroscience
Brain
neurons
Electrophysiology
Modeling
Synchronization
Encoding
Review
Share
Back to top