Fractals in the Nervous System: conceptual Implications for Theoretical Neuroscience

This essay is presented with two principal objectives in mind: first, to document the prevalence of fractals at all levels of the nervous system, giving credence to the notion of their functional relevance; and second, to draw attention to the as yet still unresolved issues of the detailed relationships among power law scaling, self-similarity, and self-organized criticality. As regards criticality, I will document that it has become a pivotal reference point in Neurodynamics. Furthermore, I will emphasize the not yet fully appreciated significance of allometric control processes. For dynamic fractals, I will assemble reasons for attributing to them the capacity to adapt task execution to contextual changes across a range of scales. The final Section consists of general reflections on the implications of the reviewed data, and identifies what appear to be issues of fundamental importance for future research in the rapidly evolving topic of this review

Excitable Media Seminar

The simulation data presented here, and the conceptual framework developed for their interpretation are, both, in need of substantial refinement and extension. However, granting that they are initial pointers of some merit, and elementary indicators of general principles, several implications follow: the activity patterns of neurons and their assemblies are\ud interdependent with the extracellular milieu in which they are embedded, and to whose time varying composition they contribute. The complexity of this interdependence in the temporal dimension forecloses any time and context invariant relation between what the experimenter may consider stimulus input and its representation in neural activity. Hence, ideas of coding by (quasi)-digital neurons are called in question by the mutual interdependence of neurons and their\ud humoral milieu. Instead, concepts of 'mass action' in the Nervous system gain a new perspective: this time augmented by including the chemical medium surrounding neurons as part of the dynamics of the system as a whole. Accordingly, a meaningful way to describe activity in a neuron assembly would be in terms of a state space in which it can move along an infinite number of trajectories.\u

Neutral coding - A report based on an NRP work session

Neural coding by impulses and trains on single and multiple channels, and representation of information in nonimpulse carrier