{"id":243267,"date":"2026-08-27T09:08:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T14:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/going-beyond-simple-models-of-neural-networks-extended-mean-field-theory-offers-a-better-approach"},"modified":"2026-08-27T09:08:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T14:08:18","slug":"going-beyond-simple-models-of-neural-networks-extended-mean-field-theory-offers-a-better-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/going-beyond-simple-models-of-neural-networks-extended-mean-field-theory-offers-a-better-approach","title":{"rendered":"Going beyond simple models of neural networks: Extended mean-field theory offers a better approach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/going-beyond-simple-models-of-neural-networks-extended-mean-field-theory-offers-a-better-approach2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Physics is most readily applied to relatively simple systems: a pendulum, two electrons colliding or the structure of the solar system. But when systems become complicated\u2014when many particles interact with one another, in condensed matter systems such as gases and fluids or in the cosmology of the early universe\u2014simplifications can be made using a technique called classical or extended mean-field theory.<\/p>\n<p>A research group from Princeton University, led by lead author Luca Di Carlo, has applied extended mean-field theory to networks of biological neurons. Their work is <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/nr71-phqw\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i>Physical Review Letters<\/i>. They found that the simplest versions of mean-field theory failed to accurately describe the activity of these networks, but an enhanced version was able to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physics is most readily applied to relatively simple systems: a pendulum, two electrons colliding or the structure of the solar system. But when systems become complicated\u2014when many particles interact with one another, in condensed matter systems such as gases and fluids or in the cosmology of the early universe\u2014simplifications can be made using a technique [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,33,48,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}