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Neuron Codes: How Does Human Cognition Really Work?
How does the human brain work? Computer scientists are working to transfer intelligence to machines, but there is still very much not well understood about how the human brain works, particularly how does the brain store information. Understanding more completely how the human brain works would likely help us create better artificial replicas.
Computer scientists use databases and file formats like XML, CSV, and JSON to store and transmit data. The human brain also uses different ways to encode data. For example, scientists have found the neural patterns for storing visual information is different than the types of neural patterns used by the brain for controlling muscle movement.
Human brain researchers are calling one neuron coding technique used by the brain to remember things related to time “phase precession.” Phase precession has to do with the frequency and timing that neurons fire and it turns out that it is frequently used when decisions are made. Salman E. Qasim, researcher at Columbia University, said that “we were convinced that phase precession held a lot of promise as a widespread neural code that could be used for learning and cognition. There’s no reason the human brain wouldn’t take advantage of this mechanism to encode any kind of sequence, spatial or otherwise.”
Studies with rats showed that phased precession is relied on very heavily in almost all kinds of brain processing. The types of experiments with rats are not ones that would be done on humans, but it is expected that the results can be extrapolated to humans.
Qasim said that “anyone who looks at brain activity as much as we do knows that it’s often a chaotic, stochastic mess. So when you see some order emerge in that chaos, you want to ascribe to it some sort of functional purpose.”
Joshua Jacobs, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, said that “we hope to further explore whether phase precession is a universal code throughout the human brain, and for different kinds of behaviors. Then we can begin to better understand how this neuronal coding mechanism can be used for brain-machine interfaces, and manipulated by therapeutic brain stimulation.”
