Neural Syntax: Cell Assemblies, Synapsembles, and Readers

Neural Syntax: Cell Assemblies, Synapsembles, and Readers

A widely discussed hypothesis in neuroscience is that transiently active ensembles of neurons, known as "cell assemblies," underlie numerous operations of the brain, from encoding memories to reasoning. However, the mechanisms responsible for the formation and disbanding of cell assemblies and temporal evolution of cell assembly sequences are not well understood. I introduce and review three in...

Learnt Novelty with Overlapping Neural Cell Assemblies

Cell Assemblies (CAs) are central to many higher order cognitive processes such as perception, recognition, and recollection. Concepts are encoded as neuronal CAs in mammalian cortical areas, where CA formation and learning happen based on the Hebbian CA theory. Multiple CAs may share a common subset of neurons that produce dynamics that distinct, localist, orthogonal CAs do not exhibit, such a...

The Influence of Semantics and Syntax on What Readers Remember

Your English teachers told you to avoid passive voice, and now your computer grammar checkers also warn you to avoid passive voice. But sometimes when you revise a passive voice sentence that flows smoothly into an active voice sentence, you realize that your new sentence flows less smoothly. Do you ever wonder whether the reader is really going to understand the sentence better or remember mor...

Neural Syntax

Webs, cell assemblies, and chunking in neural nets: introduction.

This introduction to Wickelgren (1992), describes a theory of idea representation and learning in the cerebral cortex and seven properties of Hebb's (1949) formulation of cell assemblies that have played a major role in all such neural net models. Ideas are represented in the cerebral cortex by webs (innate cell assemblies), using sparse coding with sparse, all-or-none, innate linking. Recruiti...