Dear FIS colleagues, Thanks to Karl and Joe for their responses. Sorry that I cannot answer them, but herein is the draft we are currently working in. We continue looking for partners (the easiest if they belong to the European Union). Comments are welcome...
best wishes Pedro ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * * *TOWARDS A NEURODYNAMIC CENTRAL THEORY--REVISITING CAJAL'S "LAW OF MAXIMUM ECONOMY"* Arguably, one of the most dramatic absences in the contemporary scientific system occurs in the neurosciences. The ongoing neurocomputational, neuromolecular, neuroinformatic and neuroimaging revolutions (to name but a few of the emerging disciplines responsible of the enormous experimental data-accumulation taking place in neurosciences) have not been accompanied by a parsimonious theoretical synthesis yet. Thereupon, the lack of a central neurodynamic theory playing a "circulating role" between all the neural fields, similar to the Darwinian theory's central role in the biological realm (or classical mechanics in physics), is creating an intellectual vacuum that negatively influences on the neurosciences themselves, humanities and the social sciences. The theoretic development herein envisioned will be grounded, historically, in Cajal's law of "maximum economy in space, time, and interconnecting matter" (Textura, pp. 95-106), which will be revisited from different perspectives. On the one side, both M. Leyton (1992, 2001) and K.P. Collins & P.C. Marijuán (1997) have proposed overarching optimization principles related to symmetry-operations in the neural maps that somehow imply minimization of excitations (echoing ideas already discussed by Freud himself, and more recently by Barlow, Rossler, Edelman, and Arbib; see also Cherniak, Griffin, Chen, etc. about structural optimization). Then, the emergence of the Action / Perception cycle as a basic building block to organize adaptive behavior would be inscribed within the "closure" operations of the ongoing neurocomputational minimization processes performed upon the excitation /inhibition collective variable, topologically distributed, defined both globally and locally as a sort of "entropy" in the neuronal mappings and rhythms (Gibson, Turvey, Kelso, Buzsáki). Further, the integration of such basic minimization processes within the main brain architectures --cerebellar, thalamocortical, limbic, frontal-- has to be achieved in a way that simultaneously produces the outcomes of adaptive behavior, meaning, memory contents, and the possibility of frontal "conceptual" guidance. Recent works of authors such as Rodolfo Llinás, Alain Berthoz, Jeff Hawkins, Tomás Ortiz, and Joaquín Fuster (e.g., the "cognits" proposal) would imply advancements in those particular areas for the proposed scheme. Indeed, the quest for a neurodynamic optimization principle in the neurosciences, and the central theory to be elaborated upon, that we must credit to Cajal's insights one hundred years ago, appears as a long-term interdisciplinary enterprise. If finally successful, it would boost our present understanding of information processes in the Central Nervous System and in a plethora of related disciplines, from neuro-robotics to social fields... Note: FISers Michael Leyton, Andrei Khrennikov, Fivos Panetsos, Rafa Lahoz, and Pedro Marijuan are already involved in this tentative project, Tomás Ortiz and Joaquin Fuster, quite probably, can be enlisted too. -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª 50009 Zaragoza. España / Spain Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554 pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
