Get the latest tech news
Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
But neurons don’t take averages. This ubiquitous practice hides from us how the brain really works.
“The tyranny of old-timers,” some newly minted principal investigator often mutters, cursing the difficulty of challenging entrenched ideas. The theory says there exist cortical neurons, especially those in the lateral intraparietal area, that act as evidence accumulators, ramping up their spiking in proportion to how much incoming sensory information supports the option they represent. Whenever most of us average neural activity over trials, over neurons or both, we are implicitly assuming that the resulting signal is what the rest of the brain sees.
Or read this on Hacker News
