Time as coding space for information processing in the cerebral cortex

Abstract

Psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence indicates that the brain identifies perceptual objects by decomposing them into components by analyzing the relations among the respective components and representing in a combined code the components and their specific relations. This is an efficient strategy for two reasons. First, it permits unambiguous descriptions of a virtually unlimited number of perceptual objects with a limited set of symbols for components and relations. Second, it can be scaled and applied also for the description of complex constellations, i.e. for the infinite variety of contextual configurations in which perceptual objects can occur. Linguistic descriptions follow the same principle. By recombining in ever changing configurations a rather limited set of symbols for components, properties and relations, a virtually inexhaustible universe of constellations can be encoded. However, there is an interesting trade-off between the complexity of the symbols and the syntactic rules required for the definition of relations.