Cortical columns for quick brains
نویسندگان
چکیده
Cortical columns for quick brains Ralph L. Stoop1, Victor Saase2, Clemens Wagner3, Britta Stoop2, Ruedi Stoop21 1Physics Department, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, CH-4056 Basel 2Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Winterthurerstr. 190, 8057 Zurich 3Fachdidaktik Physik, ETH Zurich, Schafmattstrasse 16, CH-8093 Zurich Email: [email protected] Abstract It is widely believed that the particular wiring observed within cortical columns boosts neural computation. We use rewiring of neural networks performing real-world cognitive tasks to study the validity of this argument. In a vast survey of wirings within the column we detect, however, no traces of the proposed effect. It is on the mesoscopic inter-columnar scale that the existence of columns largely irrespective of their inner organization enhances the speed of information transfer and minimizes the total wiring length required to bind the distributed columnar computations towards spatio-temporally coherent results.
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