Designs for a Prototype Cerebral Cortex

Abstract

The most impressive feature of the microanatomy of central nervous tissue is the prodigious number of connections it contains. The soma of each neuron and its dendrites may receive many thousands of input synapses from other neurons, and likewise, the terminal arborization of its axon may give many thousands of synapses to other neurons. We are all used to the idea that the central nervous system encodes information as patterns of connections when those patterns are activated by action potentials. However, with such a proliferation of connections the obvious question is begged: How can action potentials in specific patterns of connections represent anything specific if their origin upstream can come from so many possible sources, and their influence downstream is spread over so many further diverging and converging connections? There would seem to be an inherent ambiguity in the representation of information in nervous tissue, an ambiguity which appears unresolvable because it arises as a direct consequence of the structure of the neuronal building units of that tissue.KeywordsMotor CortexCell AssemblySingle NeuronSensory CortexAssociation CortexThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.