It’s long been thought that brain oscillations play a key role in short term memory, though there hasn’t been much empirical evidence to support this. That now seems to have changed with the publication of Phase-dependent neuronal coding of objects in short-term memory by Siegal, Warden and Miller. There is the paper as well as a high level commentary. This is quite a step forward for understanding some of the more sophisticated design features of the brain and cognition.
Another interesting paper is Coherence Potentials: Loss-Less All-or-None Network Events in the Cortex by Thiagarajan, Lebedev, Nicolelis and Plenz. They have evidence that above a certain threshold level of activity LFP information is sometimes transmitted across regions of cortex with surprisingly high fidelity.
Another cool recent paper is Rewarded Outcomes Enhance Reactivation of Experience in the Hippocampus by Singer and Frank. They show that, well, basically what the title says. This is not surprising, but until now there hasn’t been good evidence to show that this was happening. If this can be replicated, and some people I know here are considering doing this, it would fill out another part of our understanding of reinforcement driven learning in the brain.
I’m coming across so many interesting neuroscience papers these days I can hardly keep up with reading them, let alone blogging about all of them. The thing that amazes me is how the architecture of the brain is so logical — it almost looks designed.
Btw sir, shall we get the chance to see you in Lugano soon?
Yep, I’m coming for the AGI 2010 conference. Arriving 5th of March leaving on the 8th. Any space on your couch?
Shane, is your library of references public? I would love to have a peek inside.
Hey.
Your RSS and Atom feeds are borked
On an unrelated note, is your list of recommended reading anywhere on the site? It seems to have disappeared in the new version.
My RSS and Atom feeds seems to be working fine for me…?
I never seemed to get around to updating my recommended reading list, thus it got the chop. No, I don’t have a public library of references
I confirm there is a bug , when I click on the orange feed icon at the top of my browser when i browse your site, i get empty feeds.
I ran it through an RSS feed validator and it complained about some weird symbols in some text I’d pasted into a post. I’ve now fixed that and the RSS feed validates as clean. Please let me know if you’re still having feed issues. Thanks!
it works now