Taking a comparative approach, data from a range of visual species are discussed in the context of ideas about mechanisms of motion detection. The cellular basis of motion detection in the vertebrate retina, sub-cortical structures and visual cortex is reviewed alongside that of the insect optic lobes. Special care is taken to relate concepts from theoretical models to the neural circuitry in b...

This paper describes workshops as a means for generative research. The workshops are based on a need to a collaborative arena for sharing perspectives and creating shared visions. The paper presents the principles, and user and expert workshop processes in three cases. The workshops were events that gathered various actors to face-to-face collaboration and challenged them to perceive anew the o...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) plays a critical role in evolution across all domains of life with important biological and medical implications. I propose a simple class of stochastic models to examine HGT using multiple orthologous gene alignments. The models function in a hierarchical phylogenetic framework. The top level of the hierarchy is based on a random walk process in "tree space" that...

AIMS To analyze the event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) attended with the mental load arising while solving two cognitive tasks. The features of the presented visual stimulus determined the type of cognitive task that should be solved. METHODS For each experimental task and everybody's subject FFT Analysis module calculated the total power histograms from a fixed frequen...

We re-examine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules, focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness. When committees are heterogeneous, full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modiÞed rule. In contrast, the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies. Whe...

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a chronic and often severe psychiatric illness characterized by manic and depressive episodes. Among the most effective treatments, mood stabilizers represent the keystone in acute mania, depression, and maintenance treatment of BD. However, treatment response is a highly heterogeneous trait, thus emphasizing the need for a structured informational framework of phenotyp...

Synthesizing concepts and findings from a number of recent models of human consciousness, a unified model of the key properties characterizing human consciousness is outlined. Six key properties are emphasized: Dynamical representation of the focus of consciousness, Focusing of energetic resources and focusing of informational resources on a subset of system knowledge, Global Workspace dynamics...