3 ms·

So are the hexagonal latices for 2D grid cells just an artifact of whatever sphere packing[0] algorithm the neurons are using? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

• JabavuAdams 5y ago
  I love sphere packing, but we don't know that neurons do sphere packing. Check out Shimada et. al. Bubble Mesh for some fun sphere-packing algos.
  • pharke 5y ago
    I find this paragraph from the article intriguing > But the grid cells’ firing wasn’t entirely random either. Instead, there was local order: For each grid cell, the places where it fired weren’t arranged in a perfect periodic lattice, but the distances between them were too regular to be merely a matter of chance. Rather than the neat stack of oranges, the researchers were seeing something similar but less orderly, more like marbles filling a box. “They’re always stuck in some local minimum, such that there is not a lattice,” Ulanovsky said. “On the other hand, the local distances there are fixed, because all the [marbles] are sort of touching their neighbors.”