ReviewBiological cybernetics2014
Thinking in circuits: toward neurobiological explanation in cognitive neuroscience.
Review in Biological cybernetics, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 146 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mapping the Cerebral Organoid Landscape: A Systematic Review of Preclinical 3D Models in Neuroscience.Advanced healthcare materials · 2026Pooled it
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- Breakdown of category-specific word representations in a brain-constrained neurocomputational model of semantic dementia.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neurobiological mechanisms for language, symbols and concepts: Clues from brain-constrained deep neural networks.Progress in neurobiology · 2023Review
- Brain-constrained neural modeling explains fast mapping of words to meaning.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Modelling concrete and abstract concepts using brain-constrained deep neural networks.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Neural Synchrony and Network Dynamics in Social Interaction: A Hyper-Brain Cell Assembly Hypothesis.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Biological constraints on neural network models of cognitive function.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2021Review
- Molecular insights into the benefits of nicotine on memory and cognition (Review).Molecular medicine reports · 2021Review
- Why Language Processing Recruits Modality Specific Brain Regions: It Is Not About Understanding Words, but About Modelling Situations.Journal of cognition · 2020Article
- Challenges and Opportunities for Grounding Cognition.Journal of cognition · 2020Article
- Network architectures supporting learnability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Donald O. Hebb and the Organization of Behavior: 17 years in the writing.Molecular brain · 2020Review
- Crossmodal Language Grounding in an Embodied Neurocognitive Model.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2020Article
- Emergence of cognitive priming and structure building from the hierarchical interaction of canonical microcircuit models.Biological cybernetics · 2019Article
- Towards neuro-inspired symbolic models of cognition: linking neural dynamics to behaviors through asynchronous communications.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Cognitive theory has decomposed human mental abilities into cognitive (sub) systems, and cognitive neuroscience succeeded in disclosing a host of relationships between cognitive systems and specific structures of the human brain. However, an explanation of why specific functions are located in specific brain loci had still been missing, along with a neurobiological model that makes concrete the neuronal circuits that carry thoughts and meaning. Brain theory, in particular the Hebb-inspired neurocybernetic proposals by Braitenberg, now offers an avenue toward explaining brain-mind relationships and to spell out cognition in terms of neuron circuits in a neuromechanistic sense. Central to this endeavor is the theoretical construct of an elementary functional neuronal unit above the level of individual neurons and below that of whole brain areas and systems: the distributed neuronal assembly (DNA) or thought circuit (TC). It is shown that DNA/TC theory of cognition offers an integrated explanatory perspective on brain mechanisms of perception, action, language, attention, memory, decision and conceptual thought. We argue that DNAs carry all of these functions and that their inner structure (e.g., core and halo subcomponents), and their functional activation dynamics (e.g., ignition and reverberation processes) answer crucial localist questions, such as why memory and decisions draw on prefrontal areas although memory formation is normally driven by information in the senses and in the motor system. We suggest that the ability of building DNAs/TCs spread out over different cortical areas is the key mechanism for a range of specifically human sensorimotor, linguistic and conceptual capacities and that the cell assembly mechanism of overlap reduction is crucial for differentiating a vocabulary of actions, symbols and concepts.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.