Surprising importance of spontaneous order and noise to how we think

Kaschube and his colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, the University of Minnesota, and elsewhere have found a host of features that stand in stark contrast to the circuits that engineers build: spontaneous activity and correlation, dynamic context generation, unreliable transmission, and straight-up noise. Another factor is ongoing activity in other parts of the brain. For instance, the visual cortex will be activated by a visual scene, but it also receives a lot of information from other brain areas. Since there’s a lot of cross wiring, these other parts of the brain can affect activity patterns in the visual cortex at any given time. For example, when your visual cortex processes different parts of a scene, long-range correlations are likely involved in integrating information across visual space.

Source: nautil.us