Creative exploration as a scale-invariant search on a meaning landscape

Lior Noy,Yuval Hart,Hagar Goldberg,Avraham E Mayo,Ella Striem-Amit,Uri Alon

doi:10.1038/s41467-018-07715-8

Abstract

Can knowledge accumulated in systems biology on mechanisms governing cell behavior help us to elucidate cognitive processes, such as human creative search? To address this, we focus on the property of scale invariance, which allows sensory systems to adapt to environmental signals spanning orders of magnitude. For example, bacteria search for nutrients, by responding to relative changes in nutrient concentration rather than absolute levels, via a sensory mechanism termed fold-change detection (FCD). Scale invariance is prevalent in cognition, yet the specific mechanisms are mostly unknown. Here, we screen many possible dynamic equation topologies, to find that an FCD model best describes creative search dynamics. The model further predicts robustness to variations in meaning perception, in agreement with behavioral data. We thus suggest FCD as a specific mechanism for scale invariant search, connecting sensory processes of cells and cognitive processes in human.

Highlights

IntroductionIn order to search for food, E. coli climbs gradients of nutrients using a sensory mechanism that has scale invariance, responding to the foldchange in inputs rather than to their absolute level[5,6,7]
Can knowledge accumulated in systems biology on mechanisms governing cell behavior help us to elucidate cognitive processes, such as human creative search? To address this, we focus on the property of scale invariance, which allows sensory systems to adapt to environmental signals spanning orders of magnitude
fold-change detection (FCD) combines two general features of sensory systems: exact adaptation in which the output returns to a baseline level that is independent on background input signal, and Weber’s law, in which the response amplitude depends on the relative change in input and not the absolute change

Summary

Introduction

In order to search for food, E. coli climbs gradients of nutrients using a sensory mechanism that has scale invariance, responding to the foldchange in inputs rather than to their absolute level[5,6,7]. This scale invariance is known as fold-change detection (FCD): the dynamic response (including amplitude and response time) is invariant to multiplying the input by a scalar. It would be important to complement this view with mechanisms similar to biological physics, which employ feedforward and feedback loops circuits[5,32], with no need to invoke criticality arguments

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