Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her, his ownest girlie, for herself alone
What they found was that (…) every neuron reacts differently to the same input. (…) This all makes a lot of sense, because in this way, each neuron looks at the same stimulus from a slightly different perspective, enhancing the amount of information the animal can get from a single stimulus. From the point of view of information coding, this is an advantage, that comes with a disadvantage: some neurons will create ‘phantom’ information, information that isn’t there. (…)
I’ve been thinking about the conundrum of ‘noise in the brain’ before and it has been very suggestive to argue that the variability in neural activity is not just random, pernicious noise but has some functional significance–a significance which we don’t quite understand, yet.
The results by Padmanabhan and Urban provide further evidence that the highly variable activity of neurons is not ‘noise’ in a complex system, but actively generated by the brain not only to increase information capacity, but also to behave unpredictably, creatively and spontaneously in an unpredictable, dangerous and competitive world.
It also means that adding information to a sensory stimulus may be a disadvantage in terms of information coding, but it wasn’t eliminated by evolution because it prevented animals from becoming too predictable - a classic cost/benefit trade-off.
collage { John Stezaker, Untitled, 1977-8 }
