Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
6266206 Current Opinion in Neurobiology 2015 5 Pages PDF
Abstract

•Chaotic itinerancy describes cortical state transitions via neutral stability.•Chaotic itinerancy accelerates a hierarchical organization of memory space.•Chaotic itinerancy conveys information between communicating people.•Learning the meaning of symbols may necessitate chaotic itinerancy via critical states.

Chaotic itinerancy is an autonomously excited trajectory through high-dimensional state space of cortical neural activity that causes the appearance of a temporal sequence of quasi-attractors. A quasi-attractor is a local region of weakly convergent flows that represent ordered activity, yet connected to divergent flows representing disordered, chaotic activity between the regions. In a cognitive neurodynamic aspect, quasi-attractors represent perceptions, thoughts and memories, chaotic trajectories between them with intelligent searches, such as history-dependent trial-and-error via exploration, and itinerancy with history-dependent sequences in thinking, speaking and writing.

Related Topics
Life Sciences Neuroscience Neuroscience (General)
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