ReviewPhysics of life reviews2018
Answering Schrödinger's question: A free-energy formulation.
Review in Physics of life reviews, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 102 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
102 citing papers in PubMed.
- ICU Delirium as a Failure of Predictive Synchronization: A Two-Agent Active Inference Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part One.Biological theory · 2026Article
- When prediction fails: a computational complexity view of stress.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Genealogies of organizational closure: from logical paradox to mind in life.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2026Review
- Beyond representations: from active inference to active interference.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Improving the Minimum Free Energy Principle to the Maximum Information Efficiency Principle.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Why collective behaviours self-organize to criticality: a primer on information-theoretic and thermodynamic utility measures.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- As One and Many: Relating Individual and Emergent Group-Level Generative Models in Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Resilience phenotypes derived from an active inference account of allostasis.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- What is Balance? A Vital Mechano-Regulation Paradigm.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Body as First Teacher: The Role of Rhythmic Visceral Dynamics in Early Cognitive Development.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Life, its origin, and its distribution: a perspective from the Conway-Kochen Theorem and the Free Energy Principle.Communicative & integrative biology · 2025Review
- Article
- Principles of Molecular Evolution: Concepts from Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics for the Multilevel Theory of Learning.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- The Antagonism Hypothesis: A New View on the Emergence of Consciousness.Brain and behavior · 2024Review
- An Active-Inference Approach to Second-Person Neuroscience.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Active Inference in Psychology and Psychiatry: Progress to Date?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Forced Friends: Why the Free Energy Principle Is Not the New Hamilton's Principle.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- A potential mechanism for Gibsonian resonance: behavioral entrainment emerges from local homeostasis in an unsupervised reservoir network.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2024Article
- Making the Thermodynamic Cost of Active Inference Explicit.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
42 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The free-energy principle (FEP) is a formal model of neuronal processes that is widely recognised in neuroscience as a unifying theory of the brain and biobehaviour. More recently, however, it has been extended beyond the brain to explain the dynamics of living systems, and their unique capacity to avoid decay. The aim of this review is to synthesise these advances with a meta-theoretical ontology of biological systems called variational neuroethology, which integrates the FEP with Tinbergen's four research questions to explain biological systems across spatial and temporal scales. We exemplify this framework by applying it to Homo sapiens, before translating variational neuroethology into a systematic research heuristic that supplies the biological, cognitive, and social sciences with a computationally tractable guide to discovery.
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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.