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Journal ArticleDOI

The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?

TLDR
This Review looks at some key brain theories in the biological and physical sciences from the free-energy perspective, suggesting that several global brain theories might be unified within a free- energy framework.
Abstract
A free-energy principle has been proposed recently that accounts for action, perception and learning. This Review looks at some key brain theories in the biological (for example, neural Darwinism) and physical (for example, information theory and optimal control theory) sciences from the free-energy perspective. Crucially, one key theme runs through each of these theories — optimization. Furthermore, if we look closely at what is optimized, the same quantity keeps emerging, namely value (expected reward, expected utility) or its complement, surprise (prediction error, expected cost). This is the quantity that is optimized under the free-energy principle, which suggests that several global brain theories might be unified within a free-energy framework.

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Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science

TL;DR: This target article critically examines this "hierarchical prediction machine" approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action.
Journal ArticleDOI

The economy of brain network organization

TL;DR: It is proposed that brain organization is shaped by an economic trade-off between minimizing costs and allowing the emergence of adaptively valuable topological patterns of anatomical or functional connectivity between multiple neuronal populations.
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Canonical Microcircuits for Predictive Coding

TL;DR: This analysis discloses a remarkable correspondence between the microcircuitry of the cortical column and the connectivity implied by predictive coding and provides some intuitive insights into the functional asymmetries between feedforward and feedback connections and the characteristic frequencies over which they operate.
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The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review

TL;DR: A meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion finds little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions, and finds evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind.
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Structural and functional brain networks: from connections to cognition.

TL;DR: It is concluded that the emergence of dynamic functional connectivity, from static structural connections, calls for formal (computational) approaches to neuronal information processing that may resolve the dialectic between structure and function.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

An information-maximization approach to blind separation and blind deconvolution

TL;DR: It is suggested that information maximization provides a unifying framework for problems in "blind" signal processing and dependencies of information transfer on time delays are derived.
Journal ArticleDOI

Technical Note : \cal Q -Learning

TL;DR: This paper presents and proves in detail a convergence theorem forQ-learning based on that outlined in Watkins (1989), showing that Q-learning converges to the optimum action-values with probability 1 so long as all actions are repeatedly sampled in all states and the action- values are represented discretely.
Book

The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution

TL;DR: The structure of rugged fitness landscapes and the structure of adaptive landscapes underlying protein evolution, and the architecture of genetic regulatory circuits and its evolution.
Journal ArticleDOI

Distributed Hierarchical Processing in the Primate Cerebral Cortex

TL;DR: A summary of the layout of cortical areas associated with vision and with other modalities, a computerized database for storing and representing large amounts of information on connectivity patterns, and the application of these data to the analysis of hierarchical organization of the cerebral cortex are reported on.
Journal ArticleDOI

Equilibrium points in n-person games

TL;DR: A concept of an n -person game in which each player has a finite set of pure strategies and in which a definite set of payments to the n players corresponds to each n -tuple ofpure strategies, one strategy being taken for each player.
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