The use of codes to connect mental and material aspects of brain function: Comment on: “Natural world physical, brain operational, and mind phenomenal space–time” by A.A. Fingelkurts, A.A. Fingelkurts and C.F.H. Neves

Abstract

Physics of Life Reviews 7 (2010) 260–261 www.elsevier.com/locate/plrev Comment The use of codes to connect mental and material aspects of brain function Comment on: “Natural world physical, brain operational, and mind phenomenal space–time” by A.A. Fingelkurts, A.A. Fingelkurts and C.F.H. Neves Walter J. Freeman Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3206, USA Received 29 April 2010; accepted 29 April 2010 Available online 15 May 2010 Communicated by L. Perlovsky Keywords: Electrocorticogram (ECoG); Neural codes; Perception The authors propose the hypothesis that the brain’s “operational space–time” connects “subjective space–time” to “physical space–time reality”. They pose the major challenge of explaining the neural mechanisms that so rapidly transpose stimulus energies to abstract concepts – from the specific to the generic, from the material to the mental. They describe and use three levels of explanations, which I conceive in terms of neural codes [1]. As neurobiolo- gists they connect the microscopic properties of conditioned stimuli to intervals and frequencies in trains of action potentials evoked by stimuli and carried by topographically organized axons. As cognitivists they connect mesoscopic symbolic codes to bursts of action potentials from hierarchically organized feature-detector neurons that represent phonemes, lines, odorants, pressures, etc., which object-detector neurons bind into images of stimuli. As dynami- cists they connect perceptions of the world to continuous spatial patterns of oscillatory fields of dendritic activity, which self-organize and evolve on trajectories through high-dimensional brain state spaces. This macroscopic code is expressed in landscapes of chaotic attractors. Unlike other scientific codes such as those of DNA and the Periodic Table, these neural codes have no alphabets or syntaxes. They are epistemological metaphors that neurobiologists require to measure neural activity and that engineers use to design models of higher brain functions such as recognition, prediction, decision and intentional action (summarized with references in [1]). Their hypothesis posits two sets of ‘connections’ between three states: that of the world (including the body), the brain activity, and thoughts. Thoughts take time and are shallow or deep, wide or narrow, so ‘connections’ can be posited without risk of getting mired in the Cartesian swamp or the ‘hard problem’ of qualia. My data show DOI of original article: 10.1016/j.plrev.2010.04.001. E-mail address: dfreeman@berkeley.edu. 1571-0645/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2010.04.010