Ingredients for a brain

Abstract

Reviews the book, The noisy brain by Edmund Rolls and Gustavo Deco (2010). The predominant premise in the book is that the random activity in the brain acts to bias the probabilistic behavior of the system, moving it towards or away from a particular configuration. The book covers a broad range of cognitive functions from short-term memory to decision making. Aside from a brief paragraph on perception, there is virtually no mention of the phenomenon of stochastic resonance in the book, which is probably the most salient example of the functional impact of noise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)