1,720,974 research outputs found
When Outgoing and Incoming Signals Meet: New Insights from the Zona Incerta
No full textIn the sense of touch, it is the motion of the sensory receptors themselves that leads to an afferent signal—whether these receptors are in our fingertips sliding along a surface or a rat's whiskers palpating an object. Afferent signals can be correctly interpreted only if the sensory system receives information about the brain's own motor output. In this issue of Neuron, Urbain and Deschênes provide new insights into the physiological and anatomical interplay between tactile and motor signals in rats
'Where' and 'what' in the whisker sensorimotor system (Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2008) 9, (601-612))
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Vibrissal texture decoding
No full textTexture is a central component of touch. To learn how contact with a surface gives rise to a sensation of texture, many laboratories have examined the vibrissae system of rodents—a highly efficient sensory system with well-studied structural organization [by Kleinfeld et al. (Current Opinion in Neurobiology 16(4): 435–444, 2006)]. Vibrissal texture decoding summarizes current knowledge about how whisking on surfaces leads to texture sensation. The vibrissae system of rats presents a unique opportunity for investigating how sensory receptors generate signals through their interaction with the environment, and how the brain reads and interprets the afferent signals
Building Bridges through Science
No full textScience is ideally suited to connect people from different cultures and thereby foster mutual understanding. To promote international life science collaboration, we have launched “The Science Bridge” initiative. Our current project focuses on partnership between Western and Middle Eastern neuroscience communities
SCIENCE AS COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION: A CLOSED-LOOP FRAMEWORK FOR THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
Full text linkThis paper proposes that science functions as a form of collective perception, extending the closed-loop processes that govern individual cognition to the scale of research communities. Perception and scientific inquiry share the same architecture: both generate predictions, act upon the environment, and correct error until provisional convergence is achieved. Objectivity, in this view, is operational, defined by the reliability of reproducible coherence across many partially independent perceivers rather than by direct access to a mind-independent reality. Grounded in neuroscience and control theory, the framework identifies brain–world (BW) and brain–brain (BB) loops as basic architectures of perception: BW loops are embodied and analog, BB loops symbolic and linguistic. Scaling upward, these loops become the experimental and communicative networks of science. Within this structure, idealization is understood as an internal operation that simplifies feedback to isolate causal relations before re-coupling to observation. The model explains replication crises, paradigm shifts, and interdisciplinary friction as natural outcomes of feedback mismatches within communal loops. It also yields empirical predictions linking community size, communication latency, and feedback delay to consensus formation and stability. Philosophically, the framework aligns with social epistemology, scientific pluralism, and structural realism, describing progress as the dynamic stabilization of relational structures rather than the accumulation of absolute truths. By situating science within the broader family of biological perception, the paper offers a unified, testable account of objectivity and the evolving dynamics of knowledge
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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