Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories

# · ✸ 58 · 💬 10 · 2 years ago · www.quantamagazine.org · alberto_ol · 📷
The uncertainty in working memory may be linked to a surprising way that the brain monitors and uses ambiguity, according to a recent paper in Neuron from neuroscience researchers at New York University. Using machine learning to analyze brain scans of people engaged in a memory task, they found that signals encoded an estimate of what people thought they saw - and the statistical distribution of the noise in the signals encoded the uncertainty of the memory. The uncertainty of your perceptions may be part of what your brain is representing in its recollections. The individual neurons are noisy sources of information, so "It's unlikely that single neurons are the currency the brain is using to infer what it is it sees," Curtis said. "People started talking about the brain as being Bayesian," said Wei Ji Ma, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU and another of the new Neuron paper's authors. The researchers gave the decoder fMRI images of 10 brain areas involved in vision and working memory taken during the memory task. The observed patterns of activity could mean that the brain uses the same neural populations encoding the memory of an angle to encode confidence in that memory, rather than storing the uncertainty information in a separate part of the brain.
Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories



Send Feedback | WebAssembly Version (beta)