ArticleFrontiers in systems neuroscience2011
Free energy and dendritic self-organization.
Article in Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Active inference and artificial reasoning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Changes in visuocortical engagement and oscillatory brain activity during associative learning.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The phantastic organ: predictive processing in the brain.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Minimization of prediction errors during cerebral embryogenesis and the emergence of agency.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Cortical development in the structural model and free energy minimization.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- A Variational Synthesis of Evolutionary and Developmental Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The mesoanatomy of the cortex, minimization of free energy, and generative cognition.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2023Article
- Percolation may explain efficiency, robustness, and economy of the brain.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Article
- Applying the Free Energy Principle to Complex Adaptive Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The constrained disorder principle defines living organisms and provides a method for correcting disturbed biological systems.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2022Article
- Markov blankets in the brain.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Neural and phenotypic representation under the free-energy principle.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Variational ecology and the physics of sentient systems.Physics of life reviews · 2019Review
- The emergence of synchrony in networks of mutually inferring neurons.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Answering Schrödinger's question: A free-energy formulation.Physics of life reviews · 2018Review
- Am I Self-Conscious? (Or Does Self-Organization Entail Self-Consciousness?).Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2017Article
- Towards a Neuronal Gauge Theory.PLoS biology · 2016Article
- Learning of Chunking Sequences in Cognition and Behavior.PLoS computational biology · 2015Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
In this paper, we pursue recent observations that, through selective dendritic filtering, single neurons respond to specific sequences of presynaptic inputs. We try to provide a principled and mechanistic account of this selectivity by applying a recent free-energy principle to a dendrite that is immersed in its neuropil or environment. We assume that neurons self-organize to minimize a variational free-energy bound on the self-information or surprise of presynaptic inputs that are sampled. We model this as a selective pruning of dendritic spines that are expressed on a dendritic branch. This pruning occurs when postsynaptic gain falls below a threshold. Crucially, postsynaptic gain is itself optimized with respect to free energy. Pruning suppresses free energy as the dendrite selects presynaptic signals that conform to its expectations, specified by a generative model implicit in its intracellular kinetics. Not only does this provide a principled account of how neurons organize and selectively sample the myriad of potential presynaptic inputs they are exposed to, but it also connects the optimization of elemental neuronal (dendritic) processing to generic (surprise or evidence-based) schemes in statistics and machine learning, such as Bayesian model selection and automatic relevance determination.
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