Introducing the brain: special neurons spot the unexpected (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, October 06, 2023, 19:50 (203 days ago) @ David Turell

Learning produces expectations:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-10-brains-wrong.html

"Whether improperly closing a door or shanking a kick in soccer, our brains tell us when we've made a mistake because these sounds differ from what we expect to hear. While it's long been established that our neurons spot these errors, it has been unclear whether there are brain cells that have only one job—to signal when a sound is unexpected or "off."

"A team of New York University neuroscientists has now identified a class of neurons—what it calls "prediction-error neurons"—that are not responsive to sounds in general, but only respond when sounds violate expectations, thereby sending a message that a mistake has been made.

"'Brains are remarkable at detecting what's happening in the world, but they are even better at telling you whether what happened was expected or not," explains David Schneider, an assistant professor in NYU's Center for Neural Science. "We found that there are specific neurons in the brain that don't tell you what happened, but instead tell you what went wrong."

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"Previous research has shown that in the brains of humans and other animals, neurons have significant responses when a sound violates the animal's expectation and weaker responses when a sound matches expectation. But it had been unclear whether there were neurons that only had one job—to signal when a sound was unexpected.

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"they found that individual prediction-error neurons in the mice's auditory cortex not only signaled when something went wrong, but they also signaled what went wrong.

"For example, every time the sound was too quiet, one group of prediction-error neurons was activated. However, when the sound was the expected volume but came too late, a completely different group of prediction-error neurons was active.

"'When a movement makes an unexpected sound, it can violate our expectations in a lot of different ways," explains Schneider. "Different neurons are active when a movement makes too quiet a sound, and other neurons when the movement makes the wrong sound.'"

Comment: more support for my theory that our brains are designed to help us fully relate to our reality. Expectation is a major learned process.