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Updated: May 1, 2026

Large-scale Three-dimensional Imaging of Cellular Organization in the Mouse Neocortex
Published on: September 5, 2018
Cell assemblies in the cerebral cortex
Günther Palm1, Andreas Knoblauch, Florian Hauser
1Institute of Neural Information Processing, University of Ulm, 89069 , Ulm, Germany, guenther.palm@uni-ulm.de.
Abstract:
Donald Hebb's concept of cell assemblies is a physiology-based idea for a distributed neural representation of behaviorally relevant objects, concepts, or constellations. In the late 70s Valentino Braitenberg started the endeavor to spell out the hypothesis that the cerebral cortex is the structure where cell assemblies are formed, maintained and used, in terms of neuroanatomy (which was his main concern) and also neurophysiology. This endeavor has been carried on over the last 30 years corroborating most of his findings and interpretations. This paper summarizes the present state of cell assembly theory, realized in a network of associative memories, and of the anatomical evidence for its location in the cerebral cortex.
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