Collell Guillem, Fauquet Jordi
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Psychobiology and Methodology of Health Sciences, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ; Research Group in Neuroimage, Neurosciences Research Program, Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, Barcelona Biomedical Research Park Barcelona, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jun 16;6:818. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00818. eCollection 2015.
The connection between brain and mind is an important scientific and philosophical question that we are still far from completely understanding. A crucial point to our work is noticing that thermodynamics provides a convenient framework to model brain activity, whereas cognition can be modeled in information-theoretical terms. In fact, several models have been proposed so far from both approaches. A second critical remark is the existence of deep theoretical connections between thermodynamics and information theory. In fact, some well-known authors claim that the laws of thermodynamics are nothing but principles in information theory. Unlike in physics or chemistry, a formalization of the relationship between information and energy is currently lacking in neuroscience. In this paper we propose a framework to connect physical brain and cognitive models by means of the theoretical connections between information theory and thermodynamics. Ultimately, this article aims at providing further insight on the formal relationship between cognition and neural activity.
大脑与思维之间的联系是一个重要的科学和哲学问题，而我们目前距离完全理解它仍有很大差距。我们工作的一个关键点在于注意到，热力学提供了一个方便的框架来对大脑活动进行建模，而认知则可以用信息论的术语来建模。事实上，到目前为止，这两种方法都已经提出了几种模型。第二个关键评论是热力学与信息论之间存在深刻的理论联系。实际上，一些著名的作者声称热力学定律只不过是信息论中的原理。与物理学或化学不同，神经科学目前缺乏对信息与能量之间关系的形式化表述。在本文中，我们通过信息论与热力学之间的理论联系，提出了一个将物理大脑模型与认知模型联系起来的框架。最终，本文旨在进一步深入探讨认知与神经活动之间的形式关系。
