Large Scale Neural Integration
Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 5:30 am
The process of visual perception is described as beginning with the breaking up of a given scene into isolated fragments detected by many widely distributed individual neurons.Yet, visual perception is found somehow to resemble these fragments into complete objects - integrated, coherent wholes, or gestalts- which, of course, what appear in vision.
The "large scale integration problem" or "binding problem" is how the brain activity of widely spread out individual neurons come to be selected and coordinated in such a way as to produce unified cognition- a coherent visual whole, for example (Lutz et al. 2002). The dynamic "links" among the components of the nervous system are seen as the important thing for understanding large-scale integration, and not the components themselves, . Integrated, coherent consciousness as wholes (or gestalts) requires many different parts of the brain working together in concert, requires coherence underlying brain processes. In the early 1990's, an attractive, though controversial, theoretical solution to the large-scale integration problem emerged from the work of Wolf Singer,director of the Frankfurt's Mac Planck Institute for Brain Research., and a number of others who found a "synchronized firing" of neurons to portions of the same object. A synchronized firing of neurons is neurons firing together, correlated firing," "regular rhythmic patterns of firing activity" (Austin 1998, 710). Stinger (2001) suggested that such synchronized firing might be responsible for binding together of responses from multiple, widely dispersed individual neurons and the the binding together might underlie high-level cognitive processes.
The "large scale integration problem" or "binding problem" is how the brain activity of widely spread out individual neurons come to be selected and coordinated in such a way as to produce unified cognition- a coherent visual whole, for example (Lutz et al. 2002). The dynamic "links" among the components of the nervous system are seen as the important thing for understanding large-scale integration, and not the components themselves, . Integrated, coherent consciousness as wholes (or gestalts) requires many different parts of the brain working together in concert, requires coherence underlying brain processes. In the early 1990's, an attractive, though controversial, theoretical solution to the large-scale integration problem emerged from the work of Wolf Singer,director of the Frankfurt's Mac Planck Institute for Brain Research., and a number of others who found a "synchronized firing" of neurons to portions of the same object. A synchronized firing of neurons is neurons firing together, correlated firing," "regular rhythmic patterns of firing activity" (Austin 1998, 710). Stinger (2001) suggested that such synchronized firing might be responsible for binding together of responses from multiple, widely dispersed individual neurons and the the binding together might underlie high-level cognitive processes.