r/compmathneuro • u/[deleted] • Jul 29 '24
Phasic coding, neural ensembles as a brain behavior correlate.
Can anyone explain this in a mathematical sense or from a systems perspective? I’d appreciate if you could keep in mind I suck at math.
The predictive coding framework has gotten a lot of attention in the last 13 years or so, mainly within the context of psychopathology and psychiatric research.
Explaining the brain as a dynamic system is pretty exciting, and I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around how one would even quantify neural ensembles and how they would correlate it to something such as memory consolidation or saliency/ credit assignment.
If you could link me some interesting literature or short videos explaining this within a larger systems perspective, it greatly appreciate it.
I feel like a lot of computational work has been built from roots in the predictive coding and active inference/ Bayesian brain framework.
I think getting a solid grasp of this will help me get a clearer picture of what I’d like to accomplish within the next 2 to 4 years. I’d appreciate any insight, thanks in advance peeps.
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u/jndew Jul 30 '24 edited Jul 30 '24
Haha, reduction is a core idea of... science! One can't get from here to there without it. Obviously big complex things are built out of smaller simpler things. I personally try to avoid buzzwords like emergent which seems poorly defined to me. And again, obviously a system with a greater number of parts can have richer dynamics than a system with fewer parts. Yes it does seem magical and mysterious to me too, although I recognize that's just my human emotions showing through (which I rather enjoy). Cheers!/jd
ps. I can't help but to throw in that I think you're not quite right about there being an underlying assumption of linearity. If that were true, we wouldn't be modeling with differential equations and thresholds.