Microorganisms use multiple two-component sensory systems to detect changes in their environment and elicit physiological responses. Despite their wide spread and importance, the intracellular organization of two-component sensory proteins in bacteria remains little investigated. A notable exception is the well-studied clustering of the chemoreceptor-kinase complexes that mediate chemotaxis beh...

Evidence of task-specific sensory-independent (TSSI) plasticity from blind and deaf populations has led to a better understanding of brain organization. However, the principles determining the origins of this plasticity remain unclear. We review recent data suggesting that a combination of the connectivity bias and sensitivity to task-distinctive features might account for TSSI plasticity in th...

During sensorimotor skill acquisition, early learning of the required neuromuscular pattern and sensorimotor mappings is followed by an intermediate stage of gradually increasing consistency and efficiency of execution, which gives way, with persistent practice, to the later stages of automatization. It has been suggested that the intermediate stage is distinguished by refinements in the backgr...

Postural control was measured in 214 human subjects ranging in age from 7 to 81 y. Sensory organization tests measured the magnitude of anterior-posterior body sway during six 21 s trials in which visual and somatosensory orientation cues were normal, altered (by rotating the visual surround and support surface in proportion to the subject's sway), or vision eliminated (eyes closed). No age-rel...

In the current investigation, the functional organization of visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortex was examined in prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) by using electrophysiological recording techniques. Functional boundaries of cortical fields were directly related to myeloarchitectonic boundaries. Our results demonstrated that most of the neocortex is occupied by the visual, auditory, an...

The claustrum, a poorly understood subcortical structure located between the cortex and the striatum, forms widespread connections with almost all cortical areas, but the cellular organization of claustral circuits remains largely unknown. Based primarily on anatomical data, it has been proposed that the claustrum integrates activity across sensory modalities. However, the extent to which the s...

Pain is a subjective experience that protects the body. This function implies a special relation between the brain mechanisms underlying pain perception and representation of the body. All sensory systems involve the body for the trivial reason that sensory receptors are located in the body. The nociceptive system of detecting noxious stimuli comprises two classes of peripheral afferents, Aδ an...

Recently, we have presented a self-organized artificial neural network algorithm capable of learning a latent variable model of its high-dimensional input and to optimally integrate that input to compute and population-code a probability density function over the values of the latent variables of that model. We did take our motivation from natural neural networks and reported on a simple experi...

66 words) The statistics of the environment seem to exert optimal influence on the organization of functions subserving decision making. In order to make decisions about ambiguous sensory information, predictive coding models suggest that brain generate a template against which to match observed sensory evidence. Here we challenge this notion providing evidence that stochastic choices about the...