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Electronic Letters to:
- BehavioralSystemsCognitive:
Mark C. Fuhs and David S. Touretzky- A Spin Glass Model of Path Integration in Rat Medial Entorhinal Cortex
J. Neurosci. 2006; 26: 4266-4276[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]
eLetters: Submit a response to this article
Electronic letters published:
Experimental support for Calvin's theory of consciousness
- John C Gardiner (4 November 2007)
Experimental support for Calvin's theory of consciousness 4 November 2007 
John C Gardiner,
Postdoctoral Fellow
The University of Sydney 2006, Australia.Send letter to journal:
Re: Experimental support for Calvin's theory of consciousness
jgardiner{at}mail.usyd.edu.au John C Gardiner
William Calvin has written extensively on what he calls the “cerebral code” (Calvin, 1996). This model of consciousness envisages a hexagonal grid of memories underlying conscious thought. In this model memories are evoked by cortical neurons, each of which helps to implement other memories.
Generally it was considered that information movement in the brain is by transformation rather than cloning (Calvin, 1993). However, many movement command clones have been inferred from the need to reduce timing chatter during precision throwing (Calvin, 1983,1989). In addition, the transfer of information across long distances in the cortex by transformation would require a correcting reverse transmission in order to retain local firing patterns for a sensory or motor schema (Calvin, 1993). Calvin’s cloning proposal removes the need for this reverse transmission.
Incredibly, in the dorsocaudal region of the medial entorhinal cortex (dMEC) cells’ spatial firing fields show a hexagonal grid pattern (Fyhn et al., 2004; Hafting et al., 2005) and this pattern occurs spontaneously in a two-dimensional spin glass model (Fuhs & Touretzky, 2006) thus providing direct confirmation of Calvin’s model.
Moreover this data suggests that the network dynamics during constant velocity steps by the rat is neither translational or linear (Burak and Fiete, 2006). This argues again that there is perhaps a cloning mechanism at work here, supporting Calvin’s theory.
Burak Y, Fiete I (2006) Do we understand the emergent dynamics of grid cell activity? J Neurosci 26:9352-9354. Calvin W (1983) A stone’s throw and its launch window: timing precision and its implications for language and homonind brains. J Theor Biol 104:121-135. Calvin W (1989) In: The Cerebral Symphony, New York: Bantam. Calvin W (1993) Error-correcting codes: coherent hexagonal copying from fuzzy neuroanatomy. World Congress on Neural Networks 1:101-104. Calvin W (1996) In: The Cerebral Code, Cambridge Masachusetts: Bradford Books/MIT Press. Fuhs M, Touretzky D (2006) A spin glass model of path integration in rat medial entorhinal cortex. J Neurosci 26: 4266-4276. Fyhn M, Molden S, Witter M, Moser E, Moser M (2004) Spatial representation in the entorhinal cortex. Science 305:1258-1265. Hafting T, Fyhn M, Molden S, Moser M, Moser M (2005) Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature 436:801-806.
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