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Neurobiological Foundation for the Meaning of Information

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Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3316))

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Abstract

Brains create meaning and express it in information. They select and pre-process the information carried by sensory stimuli as sense data, from which they construct meaning. They post-process cognitive meaning into informative commands that control the goal-directed actions that express meaning. Meaning exists in the interaction of subjects with their environments. The process of perception by which brains construct meaning from information can be explained by analyzing the neural activity in human and animal brains as subjects engage in meaningful behaviors. Measurement is followed by decomposition and modeling of the neural activity in order to deduce brain operations. Brains function hierarchically with neuronal interactions within and between three levels: microscopic of single neurons, mesoscopic of local networks forming modules, and macroscopic of the global self-organization of the cerebral hemispheres by the organic unity of neocortex. Information is carried in continuous streams of microscopic axonal pulses. Meaning is carried in mesoscopic local mean fields of dendritic currents in discontinuous frames resembling cinemas, each frame having a spatial pattern of amplitude modulation of an aperiodic carrier wave.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720-3206, USA

    Walter J. Freeman

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  1. Walter J. Freeman
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Statistical Institute, Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit, Kolkata, India

    Nikhil Ranjan Pal

  2. School of Computer and Information Sciences, Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI), Auckland University of Technology, Private Bag 92006, Auckland, New Zealand

    Nik Kasabov

  3. Department of Instrumentation and Electronics Engineering, Jadavpur University, Salt-lake Campus, 700098, Calcutta, India

    Rajani K. Mudi

  4. Indian Statistical Institute, 203 B. T. Road, 700 108, Calcutta,  

    Srimanta Pal

  5. Indian Statistical Institute, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit, 700108, Kolkata, India

    Swapan Kumar Parui

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Freeman, W.J. (2004). Neurobiological Foundation for the Meaning of Information. In: Pal, N.R., Kasabov, N., Mudi, R.K., Pal, S., Parui, S.K. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3316. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30499-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30499-9_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23931-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30499-9

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