Competition, Cooperation, and the Mechanisms of Mental Activity

摘要

Understanding the nature of mental function represents one of the deepest challenges for contemporary neuroscience. Although the precise manner in which different cerebral structures enable higher-order cognitive processes (the meticulous path leading “from molecules to mind”) is still a mystery, a number of influential models of mental function have stressed the importance of competition between neural circuits as one of the main mechanisms behind behavioral flexibility and the sophistication exhibited by higher-order cognitive processes. Concepts like “selective stabilization of synapses” (Changeux et al., 1973; Changeux and Danchin, 1976) and “neural Darwinism” (Edelman, 1993), which can be encompassed into a family of explanatory models based upon variation/selection strategies, try to understand how the interaction with the environment affects neural architecture, by reshaping the fine structure of synaptic connections.