EAGER: Toward a New Information Theory for Neuronal Memory

许多目标激发了人们对人类记忆的科学兴趣。大脑创造、存储和获取记忆的能力有助于实现视觉、言语、学习、思维和身份识别；理解记忆既阐明了记忆的功能，也阐明了依赖于记忆的功能。伤害和疾病可以抑制或过度刺激记忆功能，极端情况下一方面会导致阿尔茨海默病和痴呆症等疾病，另一方面会导致创伤后应激障碍和成瘾；解释生物机制如何创造记忆现象的理论可能有助于准确定位导致记忆丧失的机制变化。这个项目勾勒出了一条通往一个全新理论的道路，这个理论是关于单个神经元的微观行为如何产生记忆表现的宏观现象的。这个项目的潜在结果可以更好地解释对人类记忆及其影响过程的理解。这个项目试图建立大脑行为和记忆现象的模型，并应用数学工具来研究大脑模型是否可以产生这些记忆现象。大脑行为在这里被构造为一个马尔可夫过程，该过程源于单个神经元的模型、它们的连通性和刺激。马尔可夫过程捕捉到这样的假设，即过去只通过对现在的影响来影响未来，它表现出一种称为随机收敛的特征行为，即马尔可夫过程随着时间的推移趋向于可预测的稳态行为。记忆模型旨在将记忆的提取、形成和存储捕捉为大脑状态在相应刺激下收敛到预期结果的现象，通过神经元可塑性创建新的收敛关系，并保护旧的收敛关系不受相同可塑性造成的损害。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many goals motivate scientific interest in human memory. The brain's ability to create, store, and access memories helps enable vision, speech, learning, thought, and identity; understanding memory elucidates both the functions of remembering and the functions that rely on them. Injury and illness can suppress or overstimulate memory function, with extreme cases causing ailments like Alzheimer's disease and dementia on the one hand and PTSD and addiction on the other; a theory explaining how biological mechanisms create memory phenomena may help pinpoint the mechanistic changes responsible for memory failures. This project outlines a path to a fundamentally new theory for how the microscopic behavior of individual neurons generates the macroscopic phenomena of memory performance. The potential outcomes of this project can shed greater light on the understanding of human memory and the processes that influence it.This project seeks to create models for brain behavior and memory phenomena and applies mathematical tools to investigate whether the brain model can generate those memory phenomena. Brain behavior is structured here as a Markov process derived from models of individual neurons, their connectivity, and stimuli. Markov processes, which capture the assumption that the past affects the future only through its effects on the present, exhibit a characteristic behavior called stochastic convergence, where the Markov process trends toward a predictable steady-state behavior over time. The memory model seeks to capture memory retrieval, formation, and storage as phenomena where the brain state converges to desired outcomes under corresponding stimuli, creates new convergence relationships through neuronal plasticity, and protects old convergence relationships from damage caused by that same plasticity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.