1. The secret life of predictive brains: what’s spontaneous activity for?
- Author
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Marco Zorzi, Maurizio Corbetta, and Giovanni Pezzulo
- Subjects
generative models ,Cognitive Neuroscience ,media_common.quotation_subject ,predictive brains ,resting state ,spontaneous activity ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Latent variable ,Article ,050105 experimental psychology ,03 medical and health sciences ,Cognition ,0302 clinical medicine ,Perception ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,media_common ,Rest (physics) ,Brain Mapping ,Resting state fMRI ,05 social sciences ,Brain ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Generative model ,Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology ,Action (philosophy) ,Psychology ,Neuroscience ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Generative grammar - Abstract
Brains at rest generate dynamical activity that is highly structured in space and time. We suggest that spontaneous activity, as in rest or dreaming, underlies top-down dynamics of generative models. During active tasks, generative models provide top-down predictive signals for perception, cognition, and action. When the brain is at rest and stimuli are weak or absent, top-down dynamics optimize the generative models for future interactions by maximizing the entropy of explanations and minimizing model complexity. Spontaneous fluctuations of correlated activity within and across brain regions may reflect transitions between "generic priors" of the generative model: low dimensional latent variables and connectivity patterns of the most common perceptual, motor, cognitive, and interoceptive states. Even at rest, brains are proactive and predictive.
- Published
- 2021