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Neural Phase Transitions That Made Us Mammals

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Computational Neuroscience: Cortical Dynamics (NN 2003)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3146))

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Abstract

I review two studies that both deal with radical changes in neuronal circuitry, presumed to have occurred at the transition from early reptilians to mammals: the lamination of sensory cortex and the differentiation into sub-fields of the mammalian hippocampus. In neither case the qualitative structural change seems to be accompanied by an equally dramatic functional change in the operation of those circuits. Both studies discuss the evolution of cortical networks in terms of their computations, quantified by simulating simplified formal models. The models can be conceived as variants of a basic autoassociative neural network model, whose storage capacity plays an important role in the results. Both studies dwell on the interrelationship between qualitative and quantitative change, and both studies include, as a necessary ingredient of the relevant computational mechanism, a simple feature of pyramidal cell biophysics: firing rate adaptation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. SISSA, Cognitive Neuroscience sector, via Beirut 4, I-34013, Trieste, Italy

    Alessandro Treves

  2. NTNU, Centre for the Biology of Memory, Trondheim, Norway

    Alessandro Treves

Authors
  1. Alessandro Treves
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Complex Systems Studies, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, and, Department of Biophysics, Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, MI 49006, U.S.A.

    Péter Érdi

  2. Department of Psychology, Second University of Naples, and IIASS, Via Pellegrino 19, 84019, Vietri sul Mare (SA), Italy

    Anna Esposito

  3. Dipartimento di Fisica “E.R. Caianiello”, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Via S. Allende, 84081, Baronissi (SA), Italy

    Maria Marinaro

  4. Dipartimento di Fisica “E.R. Caianiello”, Università degli Studi di Salernopar, Via S. Allende, 84081, Baronissi (SA), Italy

    Silvia Scarpetta

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Treves, A. (2004). Neural Phase Transitions That Made Us Mammals. In: Érdi, P., Esposito, A., Marinaro, M., Scarpetta, S. (eds) Computational Neuroscience: Cortical Dynamics. NN 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3146. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27862-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27862-7_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22566-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-27862-7

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