ArticleEntropy (Basel, Switzerland)2020
Modules or Mean-Fields?
Article in Entropy (Basel, Switzerland), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 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
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Limb apraxia and active inference in the visuomotor pathways.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Computational spirits: a neuroscientific account of psychedelic entity encounters.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Fragmentation and multithreading of experience in the default-mode network.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A multi-layer mean-field model of the cerebellum embedding microstructure and population-specific dynamics.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- The evolution of brain architectures for predictive coding and active inference.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- From the origins to the stream of consciousness and its neural correlates.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Article
- A data-informed mean-field approach to mapping of cortical parameter landscapes.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Markov blankets in the brain.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Dynamic causal modelling of immune heterogeneity.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Cancer Niches and Their Kikuchi Free Energy.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Message Passing and Metabolism.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The Thalamus as a Blackboard for Perception and Planning.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Neural and phenotypic representation under the free-energy principle.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Paradoxical lesions, plasticity and active inference.Brain communications · 2020Article
- Multiscale parcellation of dynamic causal models of the brain.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The segregation of neural processing into distinct streams has been interpreted by some as evidence in favour of a modular view of brain function. This implies a set of specialised 'modules', each of which performs a specific kind of computation in isolation of other brain systems, before sharing the result of this operation with other modules. In light of a modern understanding of stochastic non-equilibrium systems, like the brain, a simpler and more parsimonious explanation presents itself. Formulating the evolution of a non-equilibrium steady state system in terms of its density dynamics reveals that such systems appear on average to perform a gradient ascent on their steady state density. If this steady state implies a sufficiently sparse conditional independency structure, this endorses a mean-field dynamical formulation. This decomposes the density over all states in a system into the product of marginal probabilities for those states. This factorisation lends the system a modular appearance, in the sense that we can interpret the dynamics of each factor independently. However, the argument here is that it is
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.