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Perspectives on Neuroscience

Perspectives on Neuroscience

Published on: July 31, 2007

Cognition is an emergent property.

Earl K Miller¹, Scott L Brincat¹, Jefferson E Roy¹

¹The Picower Institute for Learning & Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

|December 9, 2024

Summary

Neural activity organization is key to cognition, with emergent properties like electrical fields and subspace coding enabling flexible brain computations. This research explores these complex, non-reducible brain functions.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Computational Neuroscience
Cognitive Science

Background:

Cognition depends on the dynamic organization of neural activity.
Understanding how neural activity is organized is crucial for explaining cognitive functions.
Many organizational aspects may be emergent properties, not simply sums of individual neural components.

Purpose of the Study:

To explore how emergent properties of neural activity contribute to cognitive flexibility.
To discuss the role of electrical fields in rapid neural communication.
To examine how population-level neural activity patterns organize computations via subspace coding.

Main Methods:

Conceptual review and theoretical discussion.
Analysis of emergent properties in neural systems.
Exploration of electrical field propagation in neural tissue.
Examination of subspace coding in neural population activity.

Main Results:

Neural organization for cognition exhibits emergent properties.
Electrical fields act as a rapid medium for neural activity propagation.
Population-level neural activity patterns, through subspace coding, organize computations.
These mechanisms are not reducible to individual neuronal behavior.

Conclusions:

Emergent properties of neural organization are fundamental to cognitive flexibility.
Electrical fields and subspace coding are key mechanisms for complex brain computations.
A systems-level understanding is necessary to fully grasp cognition.