Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience

[bananas]

http://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/03/watching-a-paradigm-shift-in-neuroscience/

Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience
by Björn Brembs, March 26

When I finished my PhD 15 years ago, the neurosciences defined the main function of brains in terms of processing input to compute output: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output transformations and how they are produced” wrote Mike Mauk in 2000. Since then, a lot of things have been discovered that make this stimulus-response concept untenable and potentially based largely on laboratory artifacts.

For instance, it was discovered that the likely ancestral state of behavioral organization is one of probing the environment with ongoing, variable actions first and evaluating sensory feedback later (i.e., the inverse of stimulus response).

<snip>

As one would expect, this dramatic shift in perspectives from input/output to output/input has led to a slew of recent publications which were not thinkable a mere 15 years ago.

<snip>

In the most recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, where I usually only find very few presentations on ongoing activity and how it leads to variability, there now were several posters on exactly this topic, seemingly out of nowhere.

<snip>

[bemildred]

1. Yes.

Very naive IMHO. The brain is not a computer, that's why we need computers.