Cognitive SystemsForesight

Brain Rhythms

Cognitive SystemsForesight

Sensory Processing

• How does the brain build coherent perceptual accounts of sensory events in the case that component features of the events are processed asynchronously in widely distributed areas of the cortex?

• Is rhythmic activity fundamental to this process?• Will future sensory systems require similar mechanisms?

• Synchronisation as a potential binding mechanism• Synchronisation as a phenomenon rather than a mechanism (correlation

vs causation)• Would be nice to have an experimental demo that temporally

synchronous activity/oscillatory activity is required to encode non-temporal information (e.g. colour)

• NB – role of oscillatory behaviour in olfactory systems is better understood

Cognitive SystemsForesight

Memory and Learning

• Rhythmic activity is observed in regions of the brain strongly linked to memory storage and retrieval processes, in particular episodic memories. Does rhythmic activity play a role in the organisation, storage, and retrieval of episodic memories, and if so, what role, e.g. chunking of individual perceptual/cognitive experiences into a complete “episode”?

• Does this have any impact on the way information composed of sequences of events might be stored/retrieved in future artificial cognitive systems?

• Evidence for rhythms outside the hippocampus (in terms of other memories)?

• Need for definite evidence/knowledge of the use of rhythmic activity in general information storage/processing

• Recounting of experiments that do appear to give evidence for above

• Presupposition in the questions that the rhythms are causal (need evidence for this)

• Find someway to selectively block degree of synchrony and observe effects (recounted experiment in bees) – difficult to do, but essential.

• Need new techniques – to make recordings from neurons, and to analyse the resulting data. We have lots of theories, need to start eliminating them.

Cognitive SystemsForesight

Large/Small Scale Systems

• If future artificial cognitive systems employ "massively" distributed asynchronous processing hardware architectures, will they face the same problems as the brain in providing coherent representations of perceptual and cognitive "objects"?

• Is the use of rhythmic activity in this respect an "emergent" behaviour of the brain resulting from inherent self-organising, adaptive mechanisms?

• If so, would we expect to observe it as an emergent feature of massively parallel, distributed self-organising architectures for synchronisation of distributed activities and the delivery of coherent behaviour?

• How do we control emergent behaviour?