Brain: Biological noise-based logic
This addresses a fundamental mystery in neuroscience about brain information processing, potentially offering a new paradigm for understanding neural computation.
The paper tackles the problem of how the brain processes information efficiently despite neural spike stochasticity, proposing that noise-based logic allows for large speed enhancements in special-purpose tasks.
Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean spike frequency - requires long times for reasonably low error probability. The mystery could be solved by noise-based logic, wherein randomness has an important function and allows large speed enhancements for special-purpose tasks, and the same mechanism is at work for the brain logic version of this concept.