Nicole Rust (nicolecrust@neuromatch.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 10:39:50 JST

@UlrikeHahn @jonny
Fascinating! I’m working to flesh out a good analogy for this line of thought. Are you thinking of something maybe chaotic, like the weather? Where small changes to initial conditions have inpredictable long term effects?

The exceedingly simple logistic equation behaves in this way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map
In it’s chaotic regime, start it at 0.2 and it will do one thing; start it at 0.20000001 and it will do the same thing for awhile but diverge. If this simple equation does that, why not the brain?

But the weather is chaotic and we’ve figured it out insofar as we have equations that can predict it in the near term and we understand why it’s chaotic. I think your point is along the lines of: the equivalent of the 7 equations for weather prediction will be harder to find for the brain. I’m trying to pinpoint: why might we think that, exactly? Because there are likely hundreds? Or they are of a different type?

(No doubt we all agree that a good first step that needs to be made is acknowledging the brain is a dynamical system upfront. We haven’t tried much of that - how far will it take us?)