Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Neuroscience — brains and nervous systems — representation, coding and dynamics measured in biological tissue.
15 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-042 | In a recorded brain, where anatomy fixes the candidate units independently, do the blocks that clear an Occam-priced test fall at the anatomical boundaries, at which scale, and how long do short-range and long-range blocks last? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-157, CLAIM-154 and CLAIM-164. THEORY-124, THEORY-097 and THEORY-088 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-048 v3 | What can report, no-report, deficit and architectural evidence each establish about experience as opposed to access, and does any of it survive in a system that lacks cortex or biology? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-039 and CLAIM-003. THEORY-091, THEORY-094, THEORY-100 and THEORY-023 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-061 v3 | In a brain, is conscious access one exclusive broadcast that reaches every specialised processor at once, or can a content be accessed by some consumers and not others? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-003. THEORY-096, the global workspace account, offers the uniform answer. THEORY-098, THEORY-102, THEORY-103 and THEORY-245 bear on it without settling a part, and the body gives each one’s limit. Deferred with its line. | Deferred |
| QUESTION-079 | Is the coordination among an agent’s regimes better described by discrete switches between metastable states or by continuous reorganization, and does the answer change what would count as a transition in the test of the synchronization objection? | From an interlocutor’s reading of LIT-638 against CLAIM-163, relayed by the owner on 2026-10-12: whether coordination is discrete switching or continuous reorganization, which decides what CLAIM-163’s transition test should look for. LIT-638 and LIT-080 are rivals on it. Filed as advice. | Open |
| QUESTION-120 v5 | Beyond distances and sparse recovery, whose thresholds share a sufficiency proof and not a necessity proof, when the record meets a random linear map that keeps what a later stage needs, in random features for kernels, the superposition toy model’s bound and phase changes, and the expand-and-threshold codes of sparse distributed memory and the fly, is it one concentration-of-measure fact applied to different families, and does each threshold count the same thing? | Filed when a survey of the record found random projections in three places and the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma in none. The three uses carry three thresholds: ε⁻² log n for distances, k log(n/k) for sparse recovery, and 2N = n for random-features regression. The question is whether these are one union bound over different families or different phenomena that share a tool. Six anchor works are now read. They show the distance and sparse-recovery thresholds share a sufficiency proof, but not a necessity proof, and that part is QUESTION-251, Answered. They give nothing that reaches random features or expand-and-threshold. For SDM and the fly, the record’s SDM recall account and its LSH account offer candidate thresholds of a different shape. | Open |
| QUESTION-153 | Do the hyperbolic Betti-curve matches in odour space and in CA1 separate a hyperbolic metric from a flat sphere or a flat multiscale code, and do they replicate on other data? | The former promote_when clauses of THEORY-191 and THEORY-192, moved here unchanged when both were narrowed to what was measured and promoted under ADR-047 v3. Each Betti-curve test rejected only uniform Euclidean cubes. On a thin shell, hyperbolic distance is nearly a monotone function of angle, and uniform hyperbolic sampling is nearly an exponential spread of scales, so flat rivals remain. Neither study has been repeated on other data or by another group. | Open |
| QUESTION-201 | Do random patterns stored by the Hebbian outer-product rule stay attractors with basins of nonzero width up to a load near 0.14N at large N, does recall then collapse for every pattern at once, and at what overlap do two stored patterns fuse? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-272. THEORY-272 was narrowed to Hopfield’s 1982 simulations at N = 30 and 100 and promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v3). Whether the capacity, collapse and fusion it measured hold at large N is open. | Open |
| QUESTION-251 | Do the Johnson–Lindenstrauss threshold for distances and the k log(N/k) threshold for sparse recovery rest on one concentration-of-measure argument, a tail bound for each fixed vector’s norm with a union bound over a family, both for sufficiency and for necessity? | The part of QUESTION-120 its readings on distances and sparse recovery settle, split off under ADR-049. For sufficiency, yes: one per-vector tail and a union bound give both, over pairs for distances (THEORY-397) and over net points on every sparse support for recovery (THEORY-390). For necessity, no: the distance lower bounds are encoding and bit-counting arguments (THEORY-395, THEORY-399), recovery’s rests on Gelfand widths, and its sharp location on face counting (THEORY-391). Random features, superposition and expand-and-threshold stay with QUESTION-120. | Answered |
| QUESTION-256 | What forms of continuity must a person keep to remain capable of governing changes in their own practical organization, and which of those forms can other processes, other people or the environment supply? | A26’s closing question in the exchange of 2026-10-22, drawn from the owner’s case of Clive Wearing (CASE-137). Wearing keeps skilled and short-horizon organization with almost no autobiographical continuity, and is sustained by others’ memory and routine. An answer would say which continuities self-governance needs (skill, short-horizon organization, autobiographical memory, experienced ownership of one’s past) and which can be held outside the person, as the extended mind holds a belief in Otto’s notebook. | Open |
| QUESTION-302 | When a memory survives the rebuilding of the nervous system that formed it, as through insect metamorphosis or planarian head regeneration, what carries it across, and what does that show about whether the animal after is the one that learned? | The owner’s angle of 2026-10-29, after the legacy and inheritance questions. Caterpillars trained to avoid an odour avoid it as moths (Blackiston, Silva Casey and Weiss 2008), though metamorphosis rebuilds much of the nervous system. Planarians regrow a brain and, with a reminder, keep a learned familiarity (Shomrat and Levin 2013). If a memory outlasts the tissue that stored it, psychological continuity across radical bodily change is not a philosopher’s fiction. A child’s repetition of the moth study with swallowtails, reported in 2026, is unpublished and not filed. | Open |
| QUESTION-303 | After cued traumatic recall, do people with persistent PTSD sample disambiguating peripheral context less than matched trauma-exposed controls, and does restoring that sampling during the same exposure produce lasting change that the exposure alone does not? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-285, moved here when the eighth status review narrowed THEORY-285 to what its simulations showed and promoted it, as THEORY-178’s moved to QUESTION-172. The model makes the prediction; whether people bear it out is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-311 | Do synaptic eligibility traces on the scale of seconds carry learning from delayed outcomes in behaving animals, so that interfering with the trace between action and outcome abolishes learning from the delayed outcome but not from immediate ones? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-909, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-909 to the delay windows Gerstner et al. review, mostly from slices, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether such traces carry learning in behaving animals is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-313 | When a habit is modelled as a prior over policies that grows by counting, do the counts fitted to an animal’s or a person’s own choice history predict when behaviour becomes insensitive to devaluation, and when it still switches at once? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-923, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-923 to what one simulated task, run once per condition, showed, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. The model makes the pattern; whether animals or people bear it out is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-350 | With V1/V2 and category-selective cortex densely sampled in the same subjects, during clearly seen images held for over a second, is content-specific gamma-band phase or amplitude coupling between them, with the evoked response removed, again brief or absent at a sensitivity that detects it elsewhere, or is it sustained for the duration of the image? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-296, moved here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted it under ADR-065. COGITATE’s iEEG (LIT-973, read in NOTE-812) had 12 V1/V2 electrodes, and the authors grant that the null “could stem from methodological limitations”. | Open |
| QUESTION-351 | Recorded with single units or dense bilateral prefrontal sampling in a no-report or task-irrelevant design, is a clearly seen image’s category present in prefrontal cortex while its identity and orientation, decodable posteriorly in the same subjects, are absent there with Bayesian support for the absence, and does prefrontal cortex stay silent at stimulus offset under an equally sensitive test? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-245, moved here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted it under ADR-065. COGITATE (LIT-973, read in NOTE-812) recorded high gamma, MEG and BOLD, with no single units; whether the pattern holds in signals it did not sample is open. | Open |