The linked site reports new information on consciousness
The Blue Brain project - thatother big science experiment in Switzerland - might finally make the link. Earlier this week at the inagural INCF conference on Neuroinformatics, Henry Markam reported that a recent modification to their detailed simulation of a rat cortical column produced persistent oscillatory activity in the gamma frequency band (roughly 40-80Hz).
This is significant, because the model wasn’t designed in any way to produce this behaviour. It simply emerged after setting up the cortical column of 10,000 cells with realisitic connectivity patterns and electrophysiological properties. As far as I understood, they simply stimulated layer IV and watched a wave of activity build up, propagate throughout the column via layer II/III and initiate gamma ocillatory activity in layer V. This behaviour only emerged following one of their weekly updates to the simulation. Markram wouldn’t say exactly what changes they made, unsurprisingly enough. Expect a publication forthcoming.
http://neuronism.wordpress.com/
Tags: Blue Brain, Consciousness
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