Cognitive Systems Foresight Brain Rhythms

Cognitive Systems Foresight Sensory Processing How does the brain build coherent perceptual accounts of sensory events in the case that component features of the events are processed asynchronously in widely distributed areas of the cortex? Is rhythmic activity fundamental to this process? Will future sensory systems require similar mechanisms? Synchronisation as a potential binding mechanism Synchronisation as a phenomenon rather than a mechanism (correlation vs causation) Would be nice to have an experimental demo that temporally synchronous activity/oscillatory activity is required to encode non- temporal information (e.g. colour) NB – role of oscillatory behaviour in olfactory systems is better understood

Cognitive Systems Foresight Memory and Learning Rhythmic activity is observed in regions of the brain strongly linked to memory storage and retrieval processes, in particular episodic memories. Does rhythmic activity play a role in the organisation, storage, and retrieval of episodic memories, and if so, what role, e.g. chunking of individual perceptual/cognitive experiences into a complete “episode”? Does this have any impact on the way information composed of sequences of events might be stored/retrieved in future artificial cognitive systems? Evidence for rhythms outside the hippocampus (in terms of other memories)? Need for definite evidence/knowledge of the use of rhythmic activity in general information storage/processing Recounting of experiments that do appear to give evidence for above Presupposition in the questions that the rhythms are causal (need evidence for this) Find someway to selectively block degree of synchrony and observe effects (recounted experiment in bees) – difficult to do, but essential. Need new techniques – to make recordings from neurons, and to analyse the resulting data. We have lots of theories, need to start eliminating them.

Cognitive Systems Foresight Large/Small Scale Systems If future artificial cognitive systems employ "massively" distributed asynchronous processing hardware architectures, will they face the same problems as the brain in providing coherent representations of perceptual and cognitive "objects"? Is the use of rhythmic activity in this respect an "emergent" behaviour of the brain resulting from inherent self-organising, adaptive mechanisms? If so, would we expect to observe it as an emergent feature of massively parallel, distributed self-organising architectures for synchronisation of distributed activities and the delivery of coherent behaviour? How do we control emergent behaviour?