Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Center for Music in the Brain, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford, Aarhus, and Pompeu Fabra, Oxford, UK.
International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford, Aarhus, and Pompeu Fabra, Oxford, UK; Center for Brain and Cognition, Computational Neuroscience Group, Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Roc Boronat 138, Barcelona, Spain; Department of Physics, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2024 Jun;28(6):568-581. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.03.009. Epub 2024 Apr 26.
To not only survive, but also thrive, the brain must efficiently orchestrate distributed computation across space and time. This requires hierarchical organisation facilitating fast information transfer and processing at the lowest possible metabolic cost. Quantifying brain hierarchy is difficult but can be estimated from the asymmetry of information flow. Thermodynamics has successfully characterised hierarchy in many other complex systems. Here, we propose the 'Thermodynamics of Mind' framework as a natural way to quantify hierarchical brain orchestration and its underlying mechanisms. This has already provided novel insights into the orchestration of hierarchy in brain states including movie watching, where the hierarchy of the brain is flatter than during rest. Overall, this framework holds great promise for revealing the orchestration of cognition.
为了生存和繁荣，大脑必须在空间和时间上有效地协调分布式计算。这需要分层组织，以促进以最低代谢成本的快速信息传递和处理。量化大脑的层次结构很困难，但可以通过信息流的不对称性来估计。热力学已经成功地描述了许多其他复杂系统中的层次结构。在这里，我们提出了“思维热力学”框架，作为量化大脑协调及其潜在机制的自然方式。这已经为大脑状态的层次结构协调提供了新的见解，包括看电影时，大脑的层次结构比休息时更平坦。总的来说，这个框架为揭示认知的协调提供了很大的希望。
