Over the past decades, neuroscience studies have painted an increasingly detailed picture of the human brain, its organization and how it supports various functions. To plan and execute desired behaviors in changing circumstances, networks of neurons in the brain can either work together or suppress each other, thus employing both cooperative and competitive interaction strategies.
Researchers at University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, McGill University, University of Aarhus and Pompeu Fabra University recently set out to better understand the mammalian brain’s underlying dynamics, specifically how its underlying architecture balances cooperative and competitive interactions between neural circuits. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, offers new insight that could both improve the understanding of the brain and inform the development of brain-inspired computational models.
“Building models of the brain is an important part of modern neuroscience,” Andrea Luppi, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “As Nobel winner Reichard Feynman said, ‘what I cannot create, I do not understand.’ Most current models, however, share a limitation. Everyday experience, from focusing attention or switching between tasks, also reveals that brain systems must compete for limited resources.
