The brain is a computation device. Like any computer, it has to represent data in some kind of structure in order to operate on it. But what are the exact data

The brain is a computation device. Like any computer, it has to represent data in some kind of structure in order to operate on it. But what are the exact data structures that brain uses? Nobody really knows, but there are some fascinating clues. Related paper: https://elifesciences.org/articles/21397 https://elifesciences.org/articles/21397 "What the success of brain imaging implies about the neural code" fMRI is a really crappy imaging technology: it has low spatial and temporal resolution. Yet when we use it to read activity in the brain, we're able to gain real insights into how the brain actually works. This paper goes into what fMRI's success tells us how about the brain represents concepts and what fMRI's success rules out: "the neural code must be somewhat spatially and temporally smooth with respect to neural activity (which is several orders of magnitude smaller than voxels) for fMRI to be successful. Whatever is happening in the roughly one million neurons within a voxel (Huettel et al., 2009) through time is being partially reflected by the BOLD summation, which would not be the case if each neuron was computing something dramatically different for in-depth discussion"