I know this subject is outside of our group's sphere of influence, but I did some reading over the summer on perception and neural activity. I was already familiar with the Grandmother hypothesis (the sparse hypothesis) which states that there are individual neurons that light up when we see certain objects, i.e. an individual neuron lights up when we see our grandmother. It is also good to know that there is another hypothesis known as the distributed/dispersed hypothesis. This hypothesis states that perceptions are dispersed over many neurons that required near simultaneous activation for the generation of imagery.
I learned of these separate theories in a book called The Brain, by Michael O'Shea (part of the Oxford Press series, A Very Short Introduction). The hypotheses are discussed on pages 76-78.
- joe
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It is interesting that the brain may be designed to conserve space as opposed to registering everything individually and making whole new neurons, but instead by using several associations to create a specific incidence.
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