ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex, but both costs are needed to predict synapse number.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Coherent-resonant netting: disorder-enhanced selectivity from transient wave-like dynamics on biological connectomes.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- A cybernetic framework for synthetic biological intelligence in the era of neural tissue engineering.Npj unconventional computing · 2026Review
- Oscillatory dynamics as the coordination layer of the organism: waves, Markov blankets, and the virtual space of cognition.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Direct energy consumption by inhibitory GABAFrontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Short-range human cortico-cortical white matter fibers have thinner axons and are less myelinated compared to long-range fibers despite a similar g-ratio.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Belief updating in decision-variable space: More fine-grained choices attract future ones more strongly.iScience · 2025Article
- Direct on-Chip Optical Communication between Nano Optoelectronic Devices.ACS photonics · 2025Article
- Recurrent neural networks with transient trajectory explain working memory encoding mechanisms.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Is stochastic thermodynamics the key to understanding the energy costs of computation?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Pattern recognition using spiking antiferromagnetic neurons.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- EEG spectral attractors identify a geometric core of brain dynamics.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Information Thermodynamics: From Physics to Neuroscience.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Digital design of a spatial-pow-STDP learning block with high accuracy utilizing pow CORDIC for large-scale image classifier spatiotemporal SNN.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Warburg Effect Reinterpreted 100 yr on: A First-Principles Stoichiometric Analysis and Interpretation from the Perspective of ATP Metabolism in Cancer Cells.Function (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- Information encoded in volumes and areas of dendritic spines is nearly maximal across mammalian brains.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Energy optimisation predicts the capacity of ion buffering in the brain.Biological cybernetics · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on byBrain power.2021
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Darwinian evolution tends to produce energy-efficient outcomes. On the other hand, energy limits computation, be it neural and probabilistic or digital and logical. Taking a particular energy-efficient viewpoint, we define neural computation and make use of an energy-constrained computational function. This function can be optimized over a variable that is proportional to the number of synapses per neuron. This function also implies a specific distinction between adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-consuming processes, especially computation per se vs. the communication processes of action potentials and transmitter release. Thus, to apply this mathematical function requires an energy audit with a particular partitioning of energy consumption that differs from earlier work. The audit points out that, rather than the oft-quoted 20 W of glucose available to the human brain, the fraction partitioned to cortical computation is only 0.1 W of ATP [L. Sokoloff,
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