Canonical microcircuits and the compressibility of neural connectomes

Abstract

A prominent hypothesis for how the brain's wiring is organized is that it is made up of stereotyped “canonical” microcircuits. Relying on a restricted set of repeated circuits, optimized for specific functions, may provide biologically advantageous inductive biases for efficient learning and help encode innate behaviors. Information theory furthermore tells us that the presence of such statistically regular circuits, termed motifs, would make the brain's wiring diagram, the connectome, compressible.