Cognitive Regime Shift II - When/why/how the Brain Breaks/DavidKrakauer
Notes by user David Krakauer (SFI) for Cognitive Regime Shift II - When/why/how the Brain Breaks
Post-meeting Reflection
1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:
- Presentation highlights
- Open questions that came up
- How your perspective changed
- Impact on your own work
- e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group
Much of the emphasis was placed on describing the necessary basic principles, models or data, for describing brain functions.
These included:
- Resting state correlations from imaging data
- Behavioral psychological experiments
- Local field potentials
- Deep neural networks
- Information theoretic formalisms.
Much emphasis was placed on either justifying or discovering appropriate levels for prediction and explanation. On this topic;
- Is there a preferred level based on fundamental principles?
- How to reconcile computational models (with strong time separation) with dynamical systems models (with a spectrum of time scales)
- How to present and justify theoretical frameworks with many free parameters - theory for complex systems (in contrast to mere complication as in physics).
- How to triangulate among levels of description
My own question dealt with the general problem: does the fact of the brain as a computational organ imply distinct regularities in the way in which it breaks?
One approach to this would be to ask about:
- Robustness and adaptability
- Critical transitions: order disorder regimes
- Cascading failure and percolation.
This triplet provides a possible informal coordinate system in which to situate a system to include the brain. The rather unique scale and connectivity and general function of brain might suggest that it sit near a critical point, balanced between robust and adaptive regimes.
Reference material notes
Some examples:
- Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
- Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
- This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
- Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).
Flack et al. 2012 summarizes our understanding of mechanisms that generate robustness (invariance of function to non-trivial perturbations) in biological and social systems. It provides a classification of these mechanisms in pursuit of more general principles that confer robustness at different time and space scales.
Reference Materials
Title | Author name | Source name | Year | Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days. | Page views | Related file |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Robustness in biological and social systems | Jessica Flack, Peter Hammerstein, David Krakauer | Evolution and the Mechanisms of Decision Making | 2012 | 0 | 31 | Download (Encrypted) |