Brain Oscillations And Predictive Coding What We Know And What We Should Learn

Predictive coding (PC) is a neurocognitive concept, according to which the brain does not process the whole qualia of external information, but only residual mismatches occurring between incoming information and an individual, inner model of the world. At the time of issue initiation, I expected an essential focus on mismatch signals in the brain, especially those captured by neurophysiologic oscillations. This was because one most plausible approach to the PC concept is to identify and validate mismatch signals in the brain. Announcing the topic revealed a much deeper consideration of intelligible minds of researchers. It turned out that what was of fundamental interest was which brain mechanisms support the formation, maintenance and consolidation of the inner model determining PC. Is PC a dynamic construct continuously modulated by external environmental or internal mental information? The reader will be delighted to get acquainted with the current views and understanding of eminent scholars in the field. It will be challenging to discover the realm of sleep where both physiological, energy preserving and mental qualia principles build on the inner models to shape and transform the self. And where neurophysiologic oscillations may both transmit external information and translate inner models from state to state to preserve the self-continuity and compactness.

Brain oscillations, or neural rhythms, reflect widespread functional connections between large-scale neural networks, as well as within cortical networks. As such they have been related to many aspects of human behaviour. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated the role of brain oscillations at distinct frequency bands in cognitive, sensory and motor tasks. Consequentially, those rhythms also affect diverse aspects of human communication. On the one hand, this comprises verbal communication; a field where the understanding of neural mechanisms has seen huge advances in recent years. Speech is inherently organised in a rhythmic manner. For example, time scales of phonemes and syllables, but also formal prosodic aspects such as intonation and stress, fall into distinct frequency bands. Likewise, neural rhythms in the brain play a role in speech segmentation and coding of continuous speech at multiple time scales, as well as in the production of speech. On the other hand, human communication involves widespread and diverse nonverbal aspects where the role of neural rhythms is far less understood. This can be the enhancement of speech processing through visual signals, thought to be guided via brain oscillations, or the conveying of emotion, which results in differential rhythmic modulations in the observer. Additionally, body movements and gestures often have a communicative purpose and are known to modulate sensorimotor rhythms in the observer. This Research Topic of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience highlights the diverse aspects of human communication that are shaped by rhythmic activity in the brain. Relevant contributions are presented from various fields including cognitive and social neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, and methodology. As such they provide important new insights into verbal and non-verbal communication, pathological changes, and methodological innovations.

Neuroscience has made considerable progress in figuring out how the brain works. We know much about the molecular-genetic and biochemical underpinnings of sensory and motor functions, and recent neuroimaging work has opened the door to investigating the neural underpinnings of higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and even free will. In these types of investigations, researchers apply specific stimuli to induce neural activity in the brain and look for the function in question. However, there may be more to the brain and its neuronal states than the changes in activity we induce by applying particular external stimuli. In Volume 1 of Unlocking the Brain, Georg Northoff presents his argument for how the brain must code the relationship between its resting state activity and stimulus-induced activity in order to enable and predispose mental states and consciousness. By presupposing such a basic sense of neural code, the author ventures into different territories and fields of current neuroscience, including a comprehensive exploration of the features of resting state activity as distinguishable from and stimulus-induced activity; sparse coding and predictive coding; and spatial and temporal features of the resting state itself. This yields a unique and novel picture of the brain, and will have a major and lasting impact on neuroscientists working in neuroscience, psychiatry, and related fields.

The nervous system is the product of biological evolution and is shaped by the interplay between extrinsic factors determining the ecology of animals, and by intrinsic processes that dictate the developmental rules that give rise to adult functional structures. This special topic is oriented to develop an integrative view from behavior and ecology to neurodevelopmental processes. We address questions such as how do sensory systems evolve according to ecological conditions? How do neural networks organize to generate adaptive behavior? How does cognition and brain connectivity evolve? What are the developmental mechanisms that give rise to functional adaptation? Accordingly, the book is divided in three sections, (i) Evolution of sensorimotor systems; (ii) Cognitive computations and neural circuits, and (iii) Development and brain evolution. We hope that this initiative will support an interdisciplinary program that addresses the nervous system as a unified organ, subject to both functional and developmental constraints, where the final outcome results of a compromise between different parameters rather than being the result of several single variables acting independently of each other.

Origins of Human Socialization introduces a new concept on the origins of basic human instinct. The book combines the three disciplinary approaches, including neuroscience, paleoanthropology and developmental psychology as an intertwined foundation for prosocial behavior. It argues that humans have the basic brain mechanisms for prosocial activity, offering new insights into more sophisticated social behavior. It also examines both visual and auditory systems in both humans and animals to explain the evolution of social interactions. Written by world-renowned researcher Dr. Donald Pfaff, this book is the first to explore why we have basic social instinct and how it works. For centuries, researchers have argued over the foundations of human behavior in society. Anthropologists point to transitions from hunter/gathers to urban dwellers leading to human domestication. Developmental psychologists highlight social competences in babies. Neuroscientists focus on specific genetic and neurochemical mechanisms that attribute to social behavior. This book brings all of these important areas together in an interdisciplinary approach that helps readers understand how they are linked. Introduces recent discoveries regarding genes and their association with brain growth Outlines the fundamentals of brain circuitry that underlies social behavior Explains the connection between loneliness and reduced anti-inflammatory responses Reviews how gene expression encourages various forms of social behavior

Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience introduces and explicates key principles and concepts in cognitive neuroscience in such a way that the reader will be equipped to critically evaluate the ever-growing body of findings that the field is generating. For some students this knowledge will be needed for subsequent formal study, and for all readers it will be needed to evaluate and interpret reports about cognitive neuroscience research that make their way daily into the news media and popular culture. New to the 2nd Edition New chapter on methodology Updated content considers the growing influence of perspectives from predictive coding, reinforcement learning, deep neural networks, and AI on cognitive neuroscience; as well as important empirical results from the past few years ranging from object and face recognition to perceptual decision making to working memory to language comprehension

A unique overview of the human language faculty at all levels of organization. Language is not only one of the most complex cognitive functions that we command, it is also the aspect of the mind that makes us uniquely human. Research suggests that the human brain exhibits a language readiness not found in the brains of other species. This volume brings together contributions from a range of fields to examine humans' language capacity from multiple perspectives, analyzing it at genetic, neurobiological, psychological, and linguistic levels. In recent decades, advances in computational modeling, neuroimaging, and genetic sequencing have made possible new approaches to the study of language, and the contributors draw on these developments. The book examines cognitive architectures, investigating the functional organization of the major language skills; learning and development trajectories, summarizing the current understanding of the steps and neurocognitive mechanisms in language processing; evolutionary and other preconditions for communication by means of natural language; computational tools for modeling language; cognitive neuroscientific methods that allow observations of the human brain in action, including fMRI, EEG/MEG, and others; the neural infrastructure of language capacity; the genome's role in building and maintaining the language-ready brain; and insights from studying such language-relevant behaviors in nonhuman animals as birdsong and primate vocalization. Section editors Christian F. Beckmann, Carel ten Cate, Simon E. Fisher, Peter Hagoort, Evan Kidd, Stephen C. Levinson, James M. McQueen, Antje S. Meyer, David Poeppel, Caroline F. Rowland, Constance Scharff, Ivan Toni, Willem Zuidema