This article investigates how neurons can use metabolic cost to facilitate learning at a population level. Although decision-making by individual neurons has been extensively studied, questions regarding how neurons should behave to cooperate effectively remain largely unaddressed. Under...

We use an ecosystem simulator capable of evolving arbitrary neural network topologies to explore the relationship between an information theoretic measure of the complexity of neural dynamics and several graph theoretical metrics calculated for the underlying network topologies. Evolutionary...

Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in word usage. Here, we show that a direct application of...

Examining elevated rates of systemic lupus erythematosus in African-American women from perspectives of immune cognition suggests the disease constitutes an internalized physiological image of external patterns of structured psychosocial stress, a 'pathogenic social hierarchy' involving the...

The self-organization of cells into a living organism is a very intricate process. Under the surface of orchestrating regulatory networks there are physical processes which make the information processing possible, that is required to organize such a multitude of individual entities. We use a...

The empowerment formalism offers a goal-independent utility function fully derived from an agent's embodiment. It produces intrinsic motivations which can be used to generate self-organizing behaviors in agents. One obstacle to the application of empowerment in more demanding (esp. continuous)...