Cognitive Regime Shift II - When/why/how the Brain Breaks/Ehren Newman
Notes by user Ehren Newman (Indiana Univ.) 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
Through many of the presentations, I found that there was a tension in identifying the right level or construct by which to think of brain function. In turn, the question was then, what does that mean about how the brain breaks.
The hypotheses that emerged for me was that the healthy / young brain is flexible, with a plurality of ways it can generate an otherwise apparently singular behavior. As such, the loss of a single way is absorbable by the system without apparent change to behavior. To some extent, this seems to be driven by the prior that disfunction or breakage must be defined as a change in behavior. Given this framework, I would argue that 'the way the brain breaks' is that is simply stops being plastic. It ceases to evolve and adapt with the environment, and eventually this creates 'breaks' or apparently inappropriate behavior.
An implication of this is that understanding how the brain breaks must take into consideration change in the of environment, not simply the brain. That is - an environment with a fixed set of statistical structure would be unlikely to ever reveal that a brain is broken.
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).
Related to the discussion of flexible distributed processing (that came up with Caterina's presentation) - there is a great paper showing how the neural code evolves despite stability in the bird song.
Liberti, W. A., Markowitz, J. E., Perkins, L. N., Liberti, D. C., Leman, D. P., Guitchounts, G., et al. (2016). Unstable neurons underlie a stable learned behavior. Nature Neuroscience, 19(12), 1665–1671. http://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4405
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5127780/
Reference Materials
| Title | Author name | Source name | Year | Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days. | Page views | Related file |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unstable neurons underlie a stable learned behavior | William A. Liberti, Jeffrey E. Markowitz, L. Nathan Perkins, Derek C. Liberti, Daniel P. Leman, Grigori Guitchounts, Tarciso Velho, Darrell N. Kotton, Carlos Lois, Timothy J. Gardner | Nature Neuroscience | 2016 | 0 | 2 | |
| A Neural Network Model of Retrieval-Induced Forgetting | Kenneth A. Norman, Ehren L. Newman, Greg Detre | Psychological Review | 2007 | 0 | 1 | |
| Cholinergic modulation of cognitive processing: Insights drawn from computational models | Ehren L. Newman, Kishan Gupta, Jason R. Climer, Caitlin K. Monaghan, Michael E. Hasselmo | Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience | 2012 | 0 | 0 |
