(June 25, 2015) New
research from Lund University in Sweden questions the prevailing doctrine on
how the brain absorbs and processes information. The idea that the brain has a
mechanism to maintain activity at the lowest possible level is incorrect.
What happens in the brain when we think and which components
make up a thought? Researchers in Lund have taken a major step towards
understanding this central issue.
Since the 1980s, there has been a general consensus among
neuroscientists that the brain has a system to maintain brain activity at the
lowest possible level while retaining function. This is known as sparse coding.
Anton Spanne and Henrik Jörntell question this doctrine in a recently published
study in Trends in Neurosciences.
“We show that previous findings indicating that the brain
has a sparse coding mechanism are wrong”, says Henrik Jörntell, Associate
Professor at Lund University. “Our conclusions are controversial and will
certainly be debated”.
The researchers’ most important observation is that the
brain instead has a very large number of connections between nerve cells, which
can be activated when we take in and process impressions. The Lund researchers
drew these conclusions partly on the basis of previous research publications
and partly from their own experiments.