Synchronicity and its use in the brain

Palm, Guenther; Wennekers, Thomas

doi:10.1017/s0140525x97361603

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Synchronous oscillation has been widely, although controversially, considered to act as a substrate for association processes in the cortex. (eg Eckhorn et al, 1988;Singer, 1994;Singer and Gray, 1995;Stryker, 1989;Bressler et al, 1993;Livingstone, 1996;Miltner et al, 1999;Neuenschwander and Singer, 1996;Palm and Wennekers, 1997;Steriade et al, 1996;.…”

Section: Cortical Interactions At Mesoscopic Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

Simulated Electrocortical Activity at Microscopic, Mesoscopic, and Global Scales

Wright

Rennie

Lees

et al. 2003

Neuropsychopharmacol

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Simulation of electrocortical activity requires (a) determination of the most crucial features to be modelled, (b) specification of state equations with parameters that can be determined against independent measurements, and (c) explanation of electrical events in the brain at several scales. We report our attempts to address these problems, and show that mutually consistent explanations, and simulation of experimental data can be achieved for cortical gamma activity, synchronous oscillation, and the main features of the EEG power spectrum including the cerebral rhythms and evoked potentials. These simulations include consideration of dendritic and synaptic dynamics, AMPA, NMDA, and GABA receptors, and intracortical and cortical/subcortical interactions. We speculate on the way in which Hebbian learning and intrinsic reinforcement processes might complement the brain dynamics thus explained, to produce elementary cognitive operations.

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Section: Cortical Interactions At Mesoscopic Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

Simulated Electrocortical Activity at Microscopic, Mesoscopic, and Global Scales

Wright

Rennie

Lees

et al. 2003

Neuropsychopharmacol

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“…As has been pointed out by Palm and Wennekers (1997), interest in this solution to the binding problem, rather than the simpler requirements of direct modelling of experimental results, has driven much of the attempts to ®nd an explanatory mechanism for synchronous oscillation. A strong presumption that linked non-linear oscillations underlie the phenomenon (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous oscillation in the cerebral cortex and object coherence: simulation of basic electrophysiological findings

Wright

Bourke

Chapman

2000

Biological Cybernetics

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A lumped continuum model for electrocortical activity was used to simulate several established experimental findings of synchronous oscillation which have not all been previously embodied in a single explanatory model. Moving-bar visual stimuli of different extension, stimuli moving in different directions, the impact of non-specific cortical activation upon synchronous oscillation, and the frequency content of EEG associated with synchrony were considered. The magnitude of zero lag synchrony was primarily accounted for by the properties of the eigenmodes of the travelling local field potential superposition waves generated by inputs to the cortex, largely independent of the oscillation properties and associated spectral content. Approximation of the differences in cross-correlation observed with differently moving bar stimuli, and of the impact of cortical activation, required added assumptions on (a) spatial coherence of afferent volleys arising from parts of a single stimulus object and (b) the presence of low-amplitude diffuse field noise, with enhancement of cortical signal/noise ratio with respect to the spatially coherent inputs, at higher levels of cortical activation. Synchrony appears to be a ubiquitous property of cortex-like delay networks. Precision in the modelling of synchronous oscillation findings will require detailed description of input pathways, cortical connectivity, cortical stability, and aspects of cortical/subcortical interactions.

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“…Some authors doubt that "binding by synchronization" is really such a realistic solution to the binding problem as it often is suggested. For instance,Palm & Wennekers (1997) argue that also other mechanisms are thinkable based on purely rate-based information.…”

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confidence: 99%

Papers on pragmasemantics

Benz¹,

Blutner²

2009

Zaspil

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Optimality theory as used in linguistics (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; Smolensky & Legendre, 2006) and cognitive psychology (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001) is a theoretical framework that aims to integrate constraint based knowledge representation systems, generative grammar, cognitive skills, and aspects of neural network processing. In the last years considerable progress was made to overcome the artificial separation between the disciplines of linguistic on the one hand which are mainly concerned with the description of natural language competences and the psychological disciplines on the other hand which are interested in real language performance. The semantics and pragmatics of natural language is a research topic that is asking for an integration of philosophical, linguistic, psycholinguistic aspects, including its neural underpinning. Especially recent work on experimental pragmatics (e.g. Noveck & Sperber, 2005; Garrett & Harnish, 2007) has shown that real progress in the area of pragmatics isn’t possible without using data from all available domains including data from language acquisition and actual language generation and comprehension performance. It is a conceivable research programme to use the optimality theoretic framework in order to realize the integration. Game theoretic pragmatics is a relatively young development in pragmatics. The idea to view communication as a strategic interaction between speaker and hearer is not new. It is already present in Grice' (1975) classical paper on conversational implicatures. What game theory offers is a mathematical framework in which strategic interaction can be precisely described. It is a leading paradigm in economics as witnessed by a series of Nobel prizes in the field. It is also of growing importance to other disciplines of the social sciences. In linguistics, its main applications have been so far pragmatics and theoretical typology. For pragmatics, game theory promises a firm foundation, and a rigor which hopefully will allow studying pragmatic phenomena with the same precision as that achieved in formal semantics. The development of game theoretic pragmatics is closely connected to the development of bidirectional optimality theory (Blutner, 2000). It can be easily seen that the game theoretic notion of a Nash equilibrium and the optimality theoretic notion of a strongly optimal form-meaning pair are closely related to each other. The main impulse that bidirectional optimality theory gave to research on game theoretic pragmatics stemmed from serious empirical problems that resulted from interpreting the principle of weak optimality as a synchronic interpretation principle. In this volume, we have collected papers that are concerned with several aspects of game and optimality theoretic approaches to pragmatics.

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Synchronicity and its use in the brain

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Simulated Electrocortical Activity at Microscopic, Mesoscopic, and Global Scales

Simulated Electrocortical Activity at Microscopic, Mesoscopic, and Global Scales

Synchronous oscillation in the cerebral cortex and object coherence: simulation of basic electrophysiological findings

Papers on pragmasemantics

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