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.
84 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-045 v3 | Felt affect is the experience of the body’s regulatory state, valenced by what that state means for staying alive and present throughout waking experience, not only in emotion; whether what is felt is a prediction of that state or a map of it is unsettled | Barrett (2017), LIT-542, and Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, are two independent accounts that agree on a base layer. What is felt as affect (valence and arousal for Barrett, feeling for Damasio) is the body’s regulatory state. Its valence is that state’s value for the organism, and it is present in hunger, pain and well-being as much as in emotion. They disagree about what the experience is of. For Barrett it is the brain’s allostatic prediction of the body, issued from agranular limbic cortex. For Damasio it is a topographic map of the body’s state, built in the upper brainstem, and their paper makes no use of prediction. Seth (LIT-135) builds on the same base but makes his claim about consciousness, not about affect. Friston (LIT-526) supports neither. Proposed: both sources are theoretical syntheses, and neither tests the claim. | Proposed |
| THEORY-059 | The readiness potential does not show that a neural decision to act precedes awareness of the urge to act | Libet read the readiness potential, which begins half a second or more before a spontaneous movement and before the reported urge, as the brain deciding first. Two independent arguments in the record remove that inference. Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (LIT-605) show that a leaky accumulator driven by noise and fitted to waiting times alone reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96), because movement-locked averaging recovers the fluctuations that crossed threshold; a prediction of theirs held in 13 people. Dennett & Kinsbourne (LIT-431) argue that the clock report times a represented content, not an event in the brain. Proposed: the authors say their model shows the potential could be fluctuation, not that it is. It says nothing about whether the urge causes the act. | Proposed |
| THEORY-062 | Model-based and model-free predictions both operate in instrumental and in Pavlovian learning, and which one controls behaviour follows their relative reliability, not the preference of a supervising system | Daw, Niv & Dayan (LIT-580) cast habitual and goal-directed instrumental control as model-free caching and model-based search, and let behaviour follow whichever estimate is less uncertain; simulations reproduce the effects of over-training, task complexity and reward proximity on devaluation. Dayan & Berridge (LIT-584) show from instant revaluation of a salt cue that Pavlovian prediction also has a model-based form, and suggest the same reliability arbitration there. Both controllers pursue the same ends; neither is the irrational one. The instrumental half is qualitative simulation; the Pavlovian half of the arbitration is a suggestion. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-063 | The unity of experience is the integration of one global world-model into a single functional cluster, and it does not require a self-model | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568: the globality constraint makes every conscious content part of one world-model. On the functional level that is “highest-order binding” into a single causal role, and on the neural level the prediction of “one single area of maximal causal density”, after Tononi and Edelman’s dynamic core. “What you subjectively experience upon experiencing your world as coherent is the high internal correlation strength between a subset of physical events in your own brain.” A unified world comes before a self: the minimal case is “Selfless Snapshot Consciousness”, and fully depersonalized states are “non-subjective consciousness”. The neural half is a cited hypothesis, the précis says little is known, and how the cluster becomes one subject’s is left open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-070 | How much cognitive control to exert, and on what, is decided by a cost-benefit computation (the expected value of control) in a specification system distinct from the structures that implement the control | Shenhav, Botvinick & Cohen (LIT-585) unify dACC’s many reported functions as one: deciding whether, where and how much control to allocate. A control signal has an identity (a task set, a threshold, an attention template) and an intensity; its expected value is its probability-weighted payoff, with future value discounted, minus an intrinsic cost rising with intensity. dACC monitors and specifies; lateral prefrontal and subcortical structures implement. The paper reviews evidence and fits nothing, so Proposed. It does not say what the cost is, how EVC is computed, or that it governs emotion regulation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-088 v2 | Slow large-scale activity in human cortex is organised as in a pattern-forming medium: its flow is set by interacting spiral defects centred on phase singularities, which sit on boundaries between functional regions, annihilate with spirals of opposite rotation and repel those of the same | Xu, Long, Feng & Gong (2023), LIT-638: in Human Connectome Project fMRI band-passed to 0.01–0.1 Hz, the cortical phase field holds about 16–19 spirals at a time around phase singularities, concentrated on boundaries between functional regions; their centres drift superdiffusively, opposite spirals annihilate (51% fully, 46% partly) and like ones repel (2.6%), and their positions and senses decode task condition above a raw-amplitude decoder. One source, fMRI only, at a spatial scale chosen because it maximised that decoding; the routing of activity flow is read from phase gradients and a phase-oscillator model, never perturbed. The kinship with Belousov–Zhabotinsky spirals and pattern-formation defects is the record’s analogy, not the paper’s. | Proposed |
| THEORY-090 v2 | A basic, affective form of consciousness is realised subcortically, in the upper brainstem and thalamus, before and without cortex, and its first function is alarm: survival behaviour, care for the body and generalised one-shot learning, with no choice between options | Newen & Montemayor’s ALARM theory (2025), LIT-626: basic arousal, a sensitivity to pain, pleasure and other basic affect without focused attention, can be realised without cortex, by the upper brainstem and thalamus, and its function is to alarm the bodily agent when a homeostatic variable leaves its range, giving the signal “100% weight” through “rather rigid behavioural programmes without choices”. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, supply the subcortical clause independently: feeling is generated in the upper brainstem and the insula is not needed. Both papers argue from cited evidence and offer no new data, and neither has a marker that tells a felt alarm from an unfelt one. The function clause rests on ALARM alone, and Veit’s account rivals it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-093 v2 | A content of mind is conscious when a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings identifies it as the organism’s own; the feelings are conscious in themselves and hybrid, partly made of the body state they map, because interoceptive pathways let the body act directly on the neurons that map it | Damasio & Damasio (2022), LIT-628, an essay with no data, read only through a summarising fetch tool, so its wording is paraphrased here. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as belonging to one’s own organism, and a continuous stream of homeostatic feelings, from hunger and pain to a faint feeling of existing, supplies it; the feelings are conscious in themselves and confer consciousness on exteroceptive images. They are hybrid because interoceptive axons are unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic and outside a systematic blood–brain barrier, so viscera and circulating molecules act on the neurons that map them. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, read in full, supply the upper-brainstem site of feeling and the unmyelinated-fibre proposal. Proposed: the identification is a definition, the mechanism an interpretation of anatomy, and the clinical evidence does not separate this account from its rivals. | Proposed |
| THEORY-094 | Neither report nor no-report paradigms isolate the neural basis of consciousness, because post-perceptual cognition that tracks the percept persists without report; only a design that removes differential post-perceptual cognition does | Block (2007), LIT-646, framed the methodological puzzle: the neural basis of experience can be found only by deciding whether it includes the machinery of access, and the evidence comes through report. The no-report paradigm was the answer. Block (2019), LIT-637, argues it has “a fatal flaw”: subjects not asked to report still think about what they see, and that thought is aligned with the percept (the “bored monkey” problem). Eliminating report isolates the basis of experience “only if it eliminates post-perceptual cognitive processing” correlated with the percept. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous rivalry, whose switches subjects detected at chance, is the one such design Block offers. The method is specific to rivalry so far, and Block says there may be no general solution. | Proposed |
| THEORY-096 | Perceptual consciousness is global availability: a content becomes conscious when the activity it drives into a core of long-range hub neurons, prefrontal among them, crosses a threshold and ignites it, so that the network amplifies, sustains and broadcasts that one content to the specialised processors; below threshold it leaves a decaying wave and is not experienced | Mashour, Roelfsema, Changeux & Dehaene (2020), LIT-631, a review by the theory’s proponents. Conscious access is “a non-linear network ignition” that amplifies and sustains a representation so that local processors can access it, in a distributed core of long-range layer II/III and V pyramidal neurons with prefrontal cortex a key hub but “not … the exclusive territory”. Ignition is exclusive: one content at a time. Evidence: seen and unseen trials diverge after about 200 ms across modalities; in van Vugt et al.’s monkeys, missed stimuli drove V1 and V4 but only reported ones, and false alarms, ignited sustained prefrontal firing, and the signal-detection threshold is the ignition threshold. The review adopts the premise that global availability “is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state”, and calls experience without access untested; that premise, not the access data, is where it rivals overflow and the sensory account. Single source, second-hand evidence, and the P3 question conceded open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-097 | Long-range coordination in the human forebrain is carried by brief ripples that co-occur at distant sites: during them neurons co-fire more whatever the distance between them, and at retrieval they carry stimulus-specific reinstatement of encoding co-firing | Verzhbinsky, Daume, Cheng, Rutishauser & Halgren (2026), LIT-633: in 1,373 single units from five bilateral forebrain regions of 35 epilepsy patients doing a Sternberg task, ripples (70–100 Hz, about 70 ms) co-occur between bundles at a median 5% at every tract distance from 71 to 223 mm, and unit pairs co-fire a median 34% more during co-ripples than in no-ripple periods, beyond a rate-only null and with no loss over distance. The gain rises with load (13% in maintenance, 19% at retrieval), and encoding co-firing for a stimulus recurs at retrieval in 0.29% of cell-pair trials in co-ripples against 0.14% outside them. Correlational throughout: one task, two load levels, clinically placed electrodes, nothing perturbed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-098 v4 | The neural basis of perceptual consciousness does not include the prefrontal machinery of cognitive access: it is recurrent activity in sensory cortex | Block’s “back of the head” position, from three papers. Block (2005), LIT-629: a phenomenal NCC (for seen motion, recurrent MT/V5–V1 activity) and an access NCC (frontoparietal broadcasting), with winner-take-all access letting a recurrent sensory representation lose and stay unaccessed. Block (2007), LIT-646: the mesh argument. If workspace activation is not part of the basis of experience, strong losing sensory coalitions explain why experience overflows access; if it is, nothing does. Block (2019), LIT-637: no-report designs do not settle the prefrontal question, because thought about the percept persists, and one design that removes it found no prefrontal difference by fMRI, which Block calls evidence against prefrontalism while granting that ECoG could still support it. Proposed: an inference to the best explanation, with every experiment second-hand and the decisive test not yet run. | Proposed |
| THEORY-100 | A neural correlate of conscious report does not require laminar cortex: in crows it is carried by the nidopallium caudolaterale, a nuclear pallial region whose neurons follow the reported percept rather than the stimulus | Maldarelli & Güntürkün (2025), LIT-650, reviewing Nieder et al. (2020): in crows reporting near-threshold stimuli, single neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), the functional analogue of prefrontal cortex, fired with the “seen” report whether or not a stimulus was shown and were silent on “not seen” reports. NCL is nuclear, not layered; the cortex-like layers and columns found in birds are confined to the sensory pallium. So a correlate of conscious report does not need laminar cortex. The crow evidence is second-hand, from one laboratory and not in the record, and a report paradigm cannot separate access from phenomenal consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-102 v3 | In Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell’s intracranial recordings from ten epilepsy patients viewing clearly visible images for up to 1.5 s, the pattern of high-frequency activity across ventral temporal cortex carried image category, and exemplar identity among 60 images, in a time-invariant code for as long as the image stayed on while amplitude fell about 80%; at the sampled prefrontal and parietal sites, category content was a burst about 150 to 600 ms after onset that did not track duration | Vishne, Gerber, Knight & Deouell (2023), LIT-644: in 430 visually responsive subdural electrodes from 10 patients viewing images for 300–1,500 ms with no report on analysed trials, high-frequency activity and single-electrode category selectivity fell about 80% from peak by 800–900 ms, while the pattern across ventral temporal electrodes kept near-ceiling, time-invariant category and exemplar information that ended a fixed delay after the image went off. Prefrontal and parietal information was confined to about 150–600 ms and ignored duration. This met the predictions both IIT’s and the global workspace’s proponents registered for the paradigm, so it did not discriminate them. Above- threshold images only, sparse right-lateralised frontal coverage, one frequency band; it does not show the code tracks experience rather than input. | Active |
| THEORY-103 v3 | Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access: in partial-report tasks more items are experienced than the roughly four that working memory holds, though any one of them can be accessed when cued | Block (2007), LIT-646, and Block (2011), LIT-640. Subjects shown 8–32 items say they see all or almost all of them, report about 4, and when cued after offset can report or compare most of any cued subset: capacity 6–7 of 8 up to 1.5 s (Landman et al.), and 7, 6 and 5 of 8 at 1, 2.5 and 4 s (fragile visual short-term memory), against a working memory that stays at about 4. Block reads the surplus as experienced. The rival “sparse” reading holds it in an unconscious store plus a conscious generic or fragmentary image, and Block argues there is no independent evidence for either posit. Proposed: every experiment is second-hand, and that the surplus is conscious is the contested step. Overflow means most items are unaccessed, not that any is inaccessible. | Proposed |
| THEORY-124 v2 | In Posani et al.’s analysis of the IBL Brainwide Map, recorded while trained mice performed one visual decision task, the eight-variable selectivity profiles of neurons within one cortical area clustered beyond a covariance-matched Gaussian null only in VISp, AUDp and SSp-ul of about 20 areas tested, while profiles pooled across areas clustered along anatomical lines; and over the task conditions each area distinguishes, at least 95% of random balanced dichotomies were linearly decodable above a label-shuffled null in 15 of 16 areas, a lenient criterion | Posani et al. (2026), LIT-708: in about 14,000 cortical units of the IBL Brainwide Map, the 8-variable selectivity profiles of 4,617 selective neurons beat a covariance-matched Gaussian null for clustering within a region only in VISp, AUDp and SSp-ul. Elsewhere the profiles form an elongated, unclustered cloud. After merging conditions a region cannot tell apart (leaving 5 to 16 of 16), ≥ 95% of random balanced dichotomies are decodable above a shuffle null in 15 of 16 regions, GU being 0.82. Types do appear when regions are pooled, aligned with anatomy. One task, overtrained mice, a lenient separability criterion. | Active |
| THEORY-191 v2 | In four natural odour sources (strawberry, tomato, blueberry and mouse-urine volatiles), the rank order of correlations between compound concentrations has the Betti-curve signature of points near the boundary of a three-dimensional hyperbolic ball, not of any uniform Euclidean cube tried, and human odour-descriptor profiles for 127 odorants have that of a full three-dimensional hyperbolic ball | Zhou, Smith & Sharpee (2018), LIT-872: for strawberry, tomato, blueberry and mouse-urine volatiles, and for Dravnieks’ perceptual ratings of 127 odorants, clique-topology Betti curves match a 3D hyperbolic model and reject uniform Euclidean cubes of every dimension tried. It does not show a tree in the data, and because the fitted odour model is a thin shell, it does not separate a hyperbolic metric from a sphere in flat space. | Active |
| THEORY-192 v2 | In twelve sessions of rat dorsal CA1 from three data sets, pairwise correlations among place cells have the Betti-curve signature of points sampled uniformly from a three-dimensional hyperbolic ball, not of a low-dimensional Euclidean cube, and the fitted radius rose with the logarithm of exploration time | Zhang, Rich, Lee & Sharpee (2022), LIT-876: in twelve sessions from three data sets, the rank order of CA1 spike correlations matched uniform samples from a 3D hyperbolic ball and not uniform samples from low-dimensional Euclidean cubes or shuffled data, and the ball’s radius rose with log exploration time from seconds to days. It does not show that the metric, as opposed to the distribution of field scales, is hyperbolic, nor that a tree is represented. | Active |
| THEORY-240 | Loss of consciousness under propofol and in chronic disorders of consciousness goes with reduced pairwise integrated information between default-mode regions that rank as gateways of a synergy-defined workspace, not between its broadcasters | Luppi et al. (2024), LIT-949, read in NOTE-799. In resting-state fMRI, the regions where synergistic interactions outrank redundant ones split by rank into gateways (mainly default mode) and broadcasters (mainly fronto-parietal). Pairwise ΦR, the whole-minus-sum Φ plus redundancy, falls between default-mode gateways in propofol anaesthesia, in 22 DOC patients, and against post-anaesthetic recovery. The original Φ shows no common decrease. The finding is correlational, pairwise and content-free. The gateway/broadcaster split is imposed by the method; only where its two classes fall is measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-245 v3 | In a preregistered multimodal test with clearly seen images, prefrontal cortex carried a seen image’s category but not its identity, and a face’s orientation at most weakly, while posterior cortex carried category, face orientation and the identity of objects, letters and false fonts, though not of faces; no prefrontal site showed the preregistered onset-and-offset response, and one, found in an exploratory analysis, responded at offset earlier than predicted | Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante et al. (2025), LIT-973, read in NOTE-812. In iEEG and fMRI, with Bayesian support for the nulls, and against a positive control, prefrontal cortex held category but no identity or orientation, and none of 655 prefrontal electrodes showed the onset-and-offset response GNWT predicted. It does not show these dimensions were unaccessed, or that prefrontal cortex lacks them in other signals: high gamma and BOLD only, no single units, and every image was seen. | Active |
| THEORY-252 | On computational functionalism, an intervention that changes no neural activity and no actual causal interaction can change consciousness, because a clamp that stays idle on the actual input removes the transitions on every other input | Gidon, Aru and Larkum (2025), LIT-1000, read in full in NOTE-818: a voltage clamp replaying a recorded response injects no current on the matching stimulus yet fixes the network’s transitions on every other, so on the Turing–Putnam definition the computation degenerates while nothing that happens changes. It is a conditional about the view, not evidence about experience; the simulation shows only what an ideal clamp does, and the premise that removing unexercised branches changes experience is cited, not defended. | Proposed |
| THEORY-261 v2 | In sparse distributed memory, recall of uniform random data from exact cues is a signal-to-noise problem whose optimum activates about (2MT)^-1/3 of the hard locations, and capacity then grows in proportion to the number of hard locations, rising toward about a tenth of them at 0.999 bit fidelity, not with the word length | Kanerva (1992), LIT-921, §§3.5–3.7, read in full in NOTE-779, after Jaeckel (1989a). An approximate derivation for uniform random data and exact retrieval cues. It does not cover noisy cues, which lower capacity, or clustered data, which the uniform design handles badly, and it does not contain the critical-distance analysis that is sometimes attributed to it. | Active |
| THEORY-262 | Neural complexity is low when a system’s parts are independent or uniformly dependent and high when small subsets are nearly independent while large ones are integrated; in simulated cortex, patchy grouped connectivity raises it above random connectivity of equal density | Tononi, Sporns & Edelman (1994), LIT-998, read in NOTE-767. C_N, the summed shortfall of average subset integration below a linear rise with subset size, is shown low at both extremes for one family of Gaussian matrices, and higher for patchy than for uniform wiring in one simulated visual area and in small linear systems. All of it is simulation. It is a whole-system number over fixed components: it does not find units or boundaries. | Proposed |
| THEORY-272 v3 | In Hopfield’s 1982 simulations at N = 30 and 100, a network of threshold units with symmetric Hebbian couplings acts as a content-addressable memory whose stored random patterns are attractors: recall degrades severely near 0.15N patterns, a pattern placed 10 bits from another at N = 100 often fuses with it, and at 25-fold overload no stored pattern stays stable | Hopfield (1982), LIT-918, read in full in NOTE-819. The energy descent is derived for symmetric couplings; everything quantitative, including the 0.15N figure, the basin width and the merging distance, is simulation at N = 30 and 100. It does not say that spurious states come only from overload: they appear at a low load too. Nor does it say anything about addressed memory. | Active |
| THEORY-285 v2 | In an illustrative active-inference simulation of post-traumatic context inference, run once per phenotype, a prior that one is in a harmful context, made overly precise by a run of harmful trials under the “vulnerable” learning and forgetting weights, makes exploratory sampling look uninformative, so the agent attenuates the periphery, never receives the evidence that would correct the prior, and the belief sustains itself; lowering precision makes the attenuation policy less vigorous without correcting the prior, and the policy returns when precision is restored | Linson, Anderson, Markham, Friston & Moutoussis (2025), LIT-983, read in version 2 in NOTE-766. A mechanism shown in illustrative simulation: policy selection by expected information gain, plus a confident prior, withholds the only disambiguating observations, so the prior keeps itself up. Exposure that restores sampling rebalances it; a precision-lowering drug only suppresses symptoms. No data are fitted, parameters are unreported, and the two intervention arms differ in environment as well as mechanism. | Active |
| THEORY-291 | The brain’s visceromotor and interoceptive regions form one intrinsic system that reproduces their tract-traced anatomy and contains the hubs of the default-mode and salience networks | Theriault et al. (2025), LIT-996, read in full in NOTE-761, reporting the group’s own 3 T (N = 550) and 7 T (N = 90) studies; Barrett (2017), LIT-542, read in NOTE-434, for the 3 T system. The anatomy and overlap are reported second-hand. The reading the paper adds, that the named networks’ psychological labels are “destined to fail” and that the brain’s primary function is allostasis, is not part of this account; the authors themselves do not claim allostasis-first is correct. | Proposed |
| THEORY-296 v2 | In a preregistered multimodal test with clearly seen images, category-selective posterior cortex showed no sustained content-specific synchronization with early visual cortex, which iEEG sampled with 12 electrodes: the preregistered phase coupling was brief, low-frequency and mostly stimulus-evoked, and exploratory amplitude coupling, gamma included, was also brief | Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante et al. (2025), LIT-973, read in NOTE-812. IIT’s proponents predicted sustained gamma-band synchronization between category-selective cortex and V1/V2 throughout a conscious percept. iEEG and MEG phase consistency found only early, brief, 2–25 Hz coupling, mostly evoked, with Bayesian support for the null; exploratory amplitude coupling was also brief. V1/V2 was sparsely sampled in iEEG. It tests IIT’s proposed implementation, not integrated information. | Active |
| THEORY-298 | Report-based evidence cannot test whether posterior cortex suffices for experience, because report itself needs anterior activity, and no marker that bypasses report has a validation resting neither on introspection nor on a contested theory | Seth & Bayne (2022), LIT-982, “Evaluating theories of consciousness” and Box 3, read in NOTE-849 from the accepted manuscript. An argument in a review, not a result: the verification of posterior-sufficiency predictions “relies on subjective report …, which in turn requires anterior cortical activity”, and validating a non-report marker by theory borrows a contested theory, by introspection, unreliable report. It says the methods are lacking “at present”, not that the question is unanswerable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-300 | Acting on a coercive instruction reduces the implicit sense of agency over the outcome, compared with freely choosing the same action | Haggard (2017), LIT-1009, manuscript pp. 16–17 and Fig. 5, read in full in NOTE-827, reporting one experiment by his group (Caspar et al. 2016). Under an experimenter’s instruction to press the key that shocked a co-participant, the perceived action–tone interval was longer and the auditory N1 to the tone smaller than under free choice. It shows a reduced experience of agency, not reduced responsibility, and the review says so. | Proposed |
| THEORY-302 | Coordinated action is controlled by tuning relatively autonomous coordinative structures, not by commanding muscles: a higher level specifies an equivalence class of acceptable states and sets the parameters of self-regulating units, leaving the realized details to them | Turvey (1977; read in the 1975 Haskins report), LIT-904, read in NOTE-826. Argued from Bernstein’s degrees-of-freedom problem and Greene’s equivalence classes, and supported at the spinal level by reflex-probe studies showing the segmental apparatus retuned in the tens of milliseconds before voluntary movement, and by Fel’dman’s joint that goes to a preset equilibrium whatever its initial conditions. Its extension to all levels, and to tuning set directly by vision, is the author’s speculation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-322 | The sense of agency over an action’s outcome draws on prospective signals from action selection and outcome prediction, not only on retrospective comparison of outcome with prediction | Haggard (2017), LIT-1009, read in full in NOTE-827. A review, reporting a binding experiment in which action binding tracked the probability of a tone on trials with no tone, a patient study in which that prospective part was absent in schizophrenia, and priming studies in which ease of action selection raised the sense of control over an outcome it did not predict. It does not say the experience is accurate: the prospective part is by its nature blind to whether control was actually exercised. | Proposed |
| THEORY-336 v2 | An ideal observer is optimal relative to the information it is given, so a constrained ideal is the optimal decoder of a degraded input, not a restricted decoder of the full one; comparing real observers with ideals taken at successive stages of the visual system places losses by stage, and in early-vision tasks human performance is reported often to parallel the retinal-stage ideal across conditions while falling well below it | Geisler (2011), LIT-1055, read in NOTE-870. A review that defines the ideal observer as optimal “given the available information and any specified constraints”, and writes it as an expected-utility argmax over the posterior given the stimulus S or a constrained representation Z = g(S;θ). Constraints are added one at a time (optics, receptor sampling and noise, ganglion-cell summation), and human performance that parallels the retinal-stage ideal while falling below it is read as loss in central factors. The empirical parts are the review’s account of studies the record has not read. The review gives no formula for efficiency and no notion of an optimum over a restricted class of computations. | Active |
| THEORY-410 | Brain–computer interface decoding does not show intentions to be causes distinct from their neural realisers: what is many-to-one realised there is a coarse cortical variable over single-neuron patterns, and each intention matches one value of it, so under proportional difference-making the evidence fits identifying the intention with that variable | Pernu (2018), LIT-147, read in NOTE-091. A conceptual argument that turns on an empirical premise the paper asserts and does not examine: that each intention corresponds to one ensemble-average firing value. Real decoders are not simple averages, and whether the mapping holds across sessions or subjects is not checked. It is scoped by its own footnote 1 to difference-making with proportionality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-454 v2 | Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional and cognition paradigmatically discursive, and percepts are put to cognitive use only inside a ‘cognitive envelope’, the global workspace read as conceptualisation, where working memory holds recoded, task-dependent abstractions rather than the percepts themselves | Block (2024), LIT-649, read in NOTE-498: the précis of his 2023 book, not the book. The main thesis is stated and its arguments are in the book, unread here. The working-memory half is the update: nine cited lines of evidence that working-memory representations differ from perceptual ones and are task-dependent abstractions (moderate). The rereading of the workspace as conceptualisation rather than consciousness is asserted, not argued against the consciousness reading. | Proposed |
| THEORY-484 | The brain implements hierarchical reinforcement learning with options: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex represents which option is active, dorsolateral striatum holds option-specific policies, orbitofrontal cortex holds option-specific values, and dopamine carries option-level prediction errors at subtask boundaries | Botvinick, Niv and Barto (2009), LIT-581, read in NOTE-451. Four proposed extensions of the actor-critic mapping, each matched to existing correlational findings, and predictions the authors say “call for further experimental scrutiny”. The evidence for prefrontal coding of subtask segments is “only indirect”. The mapping assumes pseudo-reward; other frameworks (HAM, MAXQ) would predict differently. | Proposed |
| THEORY-500 | Ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores links between kinds of situation and the body states they produced, and re-enacting those states when an option is imagined marks it good or bad, overtly as a feeling or covertly as a bias, pruning the options before reasoning weighs them; without the marks, choice under uncertainty fails despite intact knowledge and intellect | Damasio (1996), LIT-384, read in NOTE-332, the somatic marker hypothesis stated by its author; Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1997), LIT-383, read in NOTE-331, the experiment it is usually cited for. The robust result is a group difference: in the gambling task all 10 controls and none of 6 ventromedial patients developed anticipatory skin conductance responses. That controls chose well before they knew, and that the marker causes the choice, is not carried by the statistics. The mechanism is argued, not observed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-529 | A state is shown to be a representation by adaptation for transmitting information efficiently, near the optimal trade-off of rate, distortion and coder complexity under a teleofunctionally fixed distortion measure, rather than by correlation or mutual information alone, which nearly any causal link supplies and which cannot increase along a processing chain | Martínez (2025), LIT-149, read in NOTE-165: a position paper with no new theorem or data. Its sharpest point is a standard result: by the data-processing inequality, mutual information about a car/no-car decision can only fall from retina to IT, so a mutual-information criterion would place the decision at the earliest stage; explicitness is better read as ease of decoding. The rest is a proposal supported by selected examples. Complexity has no operational measure, teleofunctions are needed to fix the distortion measure or every system is efficient for some loss, and misrepresentation and engineered systems are not addressed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-571 | A brain state is better characterised by how its activity moves among a repertoire of weakly coupled metastable substates on a landscape constrained by the structural connectome, their occupancy, dwell times and transitions, than by static connectivity; health is a metastable balance, depression a landscape of over-deep attractors and psychedelic states a flattened one, at opposite ends of one spectrum | Vohryzek, Cabral, Vuust, Deco & Kringelbach (2022), LIT-080, read in full in NOTE-054. A perspective that reports no data: the landscape (Fig. 6) is illustrative, adapted from earlier work, and no study measures depressed and psychedelic states on a common scale. The psychedelic evidence is small cited studies of broader substate repertoires and higher signal diversity; the depression evidence is three studies, one in remitted patients, though the abstract calls depression “excessively rigid”. The modelling section is heavily self-citing. Proposed: a framing, with the record’s rival description of the same dynamics as continuous in THEORY-088. | Proposed |
| THEORY-593 v2 | Perceptual learning can install perceiver-specific frames that change which objects a perceiver individuates from the same input, so cognition can shape the perceptual system over time while leaving open whether any single percept is cognitively penetrated | Ivy & Mroczko-Wąsowicz (2025), LIT-099, read in NOTE-150. A conceptual proposal: a frame is installed by learning, often top-down, and then runs as a perceiver-specific structural principle of objecthood, so the system-level and episode-level questions about cognitive penetration come apart. The support is others’ results reread through the concept, and one eye-tracking study of the authors’. The paper does not say what “bottom-up” means once priors sit in early processing, calls a frame “a specific top-down prediction” in §3.iii, and shows different weightings, not different objects. | Proposed |
| THEORY-603 | In the Iowa gambling task, every one of ten controls and none of six patients with bilateral ventromedial prefrontal damage developed anticipatory skin-conductance responses, and three patients who could state the right strategy still did not switch to the good decks; the controls’ preference for the good decks became significant only once they reported a hunch, so the study does not show advantageous choice or deck-specific bodily signals before any awareness | Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio (1997), LIT-383, read in NOTE-331. The robust results are the group difference in anticipatory SCRs (Fisher’s exact, one-sided P < 0.001) and the insufficiency of stated knowledge in three patients. The abstract’s “before they realized which strategy worked best” and “before they knew” outrun notes 8 and 9: the pre-hunch choice preference was not significant, and the pre-hunch SCR effect reported is group × period, with no bad-versus-good deck test. Nothing here shows that the SCR, or what it indexes, causes the choice. | Active |
| THEORY-618 | Neural circuits that must represent hierarchically organised states in few dimensions use a hyperbolic geometry, three-dimensional where it has been measured, because hyperbolic space holds exponentially many well-separated states within a small radius; the argument from Zipf’s law to this geometry does not hold, and the evidence is two Betti-curve studies tested only against uniform Euclidean nulls | Sharpee (2019), LIT-875, read in NOTE-670: a four-page programmatic review with no new result, whose reading filed no THEORY because its claims are conjectures. Filed here as Proposed because the record holds two tests of the conjecture, odour statistics (LIT-872, THEORY-191) and CA1 place-cell correlations (LIT-876, THEORY-192), and no general statement. The Zipf step shows a shared exponential count of states, which any system with extensive entropy has, not a shared metric, and the rigidity argument for three dimensions cites Mostow’s theorem, which concerns finite-volume manifolds and says nothing about noisy point clouds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-660 | The local branching geometry of physical tree networks, neurons, blood vessels, trees, corals and plants, is set by minimising the surface area of tubes that must keep a minimum circumference, not by minimising length: this predicts trifurcations once links are thick relative to their separation (χ = w/r above about 0.83) and orthogonal sprouts once one branch is much thinner than the other two (ρ = w′/w below about 0.6), both departures from Steiner trees that the data show qualitatively | Meng, Piazza, Both, Barzel & Barabási (2026), LIT-069, read in full with the SI in NOTE-075. Only two symmetric motifs are solved, each by a local, penalised optimiser started from the Steiner layout; the “exact” mapping to string worldsheets holds for a problem the paper does not solve. The random-terminal prediction is a sigmoid fitted to one tetrahedron, trifurcations are partly made by a merging rule, the one robustness check moves the key statistic 4.3-fold, and the sprouting breakpoints are chosen per dataset with no null. Real motifs are about 25% longer than Steiner, which the model leaves unexplained. | Proposed |
| THEORY-682 | The time-average of a single threshold (Hill) response to a periodic signal is independent of the signal’s period for a fixed waveform, so a frequency cannot be read by one sigmoidal stage; two cascaded stages can read it, because the first changes the waveform with period; and a delayed kinesin–dynein signalling loop whose period grows with axon length, read out this way and coupled to protrusion and contraction, can hold an axon at a stable length | Folz, Wettmann, Morigi & Kruse (2018; PRE 2019), LIT-034, read in full in NOTE-067. The period independence is proved, for signals that differ by a time rescaling only; the two-stage readout is shown numerically and in the Heaviside limit; the loop’s minimum length and ω ≈ √3 v/L for long axons come from linear stability analysis. The length control is a lumped delay-differential model with one parameter set and the motor velocity v never stated, so its absolute lengths, about 125 µm, cannot be reproduced. A proof of mechanism, not a model fitted to axons. | Proposed |
| THEORY-697 | Sparse distributed memory’s read weights each stored pattern by the number of hard locations within the read radius of both query and pattern, a ball-intersection count that falls roughly exponentially in Hamming distance over a local window, so softmax attention over cosine similarity of unit-norm queries and keys, with a fitted inverse temperature, approximates the SDM read there; the approximation cannot hold globally, since the binary count vanishes beyond twice the radius, and its inverse temperature comes from a regression, not from the paper’s analytic bound | Bricken & Pehlevan (2021), LIT-269, read in full in NOTE-242, which re-evaluated the intersection formula and the fit. The exact intersection (Eq. 2) is checked against Kanerva’s lune formula and simulation; eight SDM and fitted-softmax variants retrieve almost identically on random patterns, MNIST and CIFAR-10, with three named exceptions. The intersection is a staircase in distance, the fit holds to about dv = 20 for d = 15, the analytic β of App. B.2 is about 2–2.5 times too small, and every optimal radius assumes random patterns and addresses. The GPT-2 “confirmation” and the cerebellar implementation of attention are argument, not demonstration. | Active |
| THEORY-765 v2 | Brushing a seen rubber hand in synchrony with the hidden real hand makes touch be felt at the rubber hand, makes it be reported as one’s own, and shifts the felt position of the real hand toward it; a small asynchrony removes these effects | Botvinick & Cohen (1998), LIT-1277, read in full in NOTE-1006. Ten subjects affirmed referred touch and ownership after ten minutes of synchronous brushing; after thirty minutes their blind reaches drifted toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion was reported; asynchronous brushing cut both. It does not show that synchrony alone, apart from expectation, produces the report, and it concerns a hand, not the whole body or the self. | Rejected — Rejected on 2026-10-20 by its own refutation condition: drift toward the rubber hand appeared as strongly under asynchronous brushing interrupted by pauses, and with the hand only seen (Rohde et al. 2011, LIT-1281). Its suggestion control was also too weak to separate perception from expectation (Lush & Seth 2022, LIT-1267). The report half is restated, narrower, in THEORY-766. |
| THEORY-766 v2 | Brushing a seen rubber hand in synchrony with the hidden real hand, against asynchronous brushing, raises reports that touch is felt at the rubber hand and, more weakly and less reliably, that the rubber hand is one’s own; the proprioceptive drift toward the rubber hand that accompanies these reports is not a measure of them; the standard comparison conditions do not equalise participants’ expectations, so whether the stimulation or the expectation produces the report difference is open | Botvinick & Cohen (1998) and four replications read here give a synchrony effect on reports of referred touch and ownership. Rohde et al. (2011) and Abdulkarim & Ehrsson (2016) separate drift from ownership. The suggestion debate (Lush 2020; Lush et al. 2020; Ehrsson et al. 2022; Lush & Seth 2022; Roseboom & Lush 2022) shows that the standard controls do not equalise expectations. The ownership report is weaker than the referred-touch report and tracks trait suggestibility. Whether the synchronous stimulation, not expectation, produces the report difference is not settled. Promoted 2026-10-20 on the report differences measured (ADR-047 v3); the perceptual reading is THEORY-827. | Active |
| THEORY-767 v2 | Body ownership draws on interoceptive as well as exteroceptive signals: a visual cue synchronous with one’s heartbeat increases ownership of a virtual hand and identification with a virtual body, and lower interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion | Seth (2013), LIT-1263, read in full in NOTE-1000. An opinion article that reports, at second hand, that a virtual hand pulsing with the heartbeat was owned more (Suzuki et al. 2013, the author’s own group), that a virtual body pulsing with it was identified with more (Aspell et al. 2013), and that people with lower heartbeat-detection sensitivity are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion (Tsakiris et al. 2011). None of the studies was read here, and no control separates the heartbeat from any other periodic signal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-768 v2 | Minimal selfhood is identification with the whole body, located where that body is felt to be and seen from inside it; owning a body part does not reach it, and bodily agency enables it causally without being part of it | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), LIT-1274, read in full in NOTE-1002, with Lenggenhager et al. (2007), LIT-1279, read in full in NOTE-999, for the full-body illusion it leans on. Minimal phenomenal selfhood is given three dimensions: global self-identification, self-location and a weak first-person perspective. Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and full-body illusions vary them; the rubber hand illusion is said not to. The necessity and sufficiency claims are asserted, and the agency thesis rests on adults whose agency was intact. | Proposed |
| THEORY-769 v2 | Ownership of a body part is a graded belief that it is the most probable common cause of correlated multisensory input, so that synchronous stimulation of another object moves some of that belief to the object and away from the real part | Apps & Tsakiris (2014), LIT-1262, read in full in NOTE-991, with Botvinick & Cohen (1998), LIT-1277, for the illusion it explains. The rubber hand, enfacement and rubber-voice illusions are read as one inference: unimodal surprise from synchronous stimulation is explained away by shifting the probability that a part is “me”. The account fits the findings; its authors grant there is little direct evidence and that it is hard to falsify with standard fMRI. It does not say why such a model is experienced as a self. | Proposed |
| THEORY-800 | A network of N threshold units with symmetric Hebbian couplings stores random patterns as attractors up to a load proportional to N, about 0.15N for all large N, past which recall fails for every pattern at once, and a provision for forgetting old memories, such as couplings that saturate, keeps the most recent ones retrievable however many are added | The large-N and forgetting clauses that THEORY-272’s title carried before the promotion audit (batch 051) narrowed it to Hopfield’s simulations at N = 30 and 100. Hopfield (1982), LIT-918, expects the 0.15N figure “for all large N” from a crosstalk estimate, and states in words that overload makes every memory irretrievable unless old ones are forgotten, with saturating couplings as the mechanism. Filed under ADR-047 v4. | Proposed |
| THEORY-827 | The rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion driven by multisensory integration: the difference in reports between synchronous and asynchronous brushing is produced by the stimulation, not by participants’ expectations | Ehrsson et al. (2022), LIT-1264, read in NOTE-997, conclude that the rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion driven primarily by multisensory mechanisms (NOTE-997, C8), from the synchrony difference’s independence of hypnotisability in Lush et al.’s 353 participants. Lush and Seth’s reply, LIT-1267, shows that uniform but unequal expectations predict the same null. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-766, only the report differences and that the standard controls do not equalise expectations. This is the perceptual reading, filed under ADR-047 v4 when that narrowing set it aside. | Proposed |
| THEORY-830 | In human visual cortex the content of a sustained seen image is carried by a stable population code that lasts as long as the image, not by a sustained level of activity, and frontoparietal cortex marks only its onset; so a sustained experience rests on sensory representation and its discrete updates on frontoparietal representation | Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell (2023), LIT-644, read in full in NOTE-499, conclude from their intracranial recordings that sustained visual experience may rest on a stable sensory representation, with frontoparietal representation serving discrete updates, and propose a stable “experience subspace”. Their measurement, in ten patients and for images up to 1.5 s, is the Active THEORY-102. This is the general claim that measurement was filed to support, held Proposed until a second method or cohort and a case where percept and input come apart test it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-870 v2 | In one study of 33 experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 matched controls who counted instead, the practitioners rated their session higher on a retrospective pure-awareness scale whose top was defined for them as free from content (d = 0.77), and a classifier on EEG separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy on held-out subjects and, within practitioners, meditation from rest with 88% sensitivity; the authors found no robust association between the ratings and the EEG features | Chandia-Jorquera et al. (2026), LIT-1354, read in the bioRxiv v3 preprint in NOTE-1058. 33 practitioners against 33 matched controls who counted: higher and more variable retrospective pure-awareness traces (d = 0.77, 1.32); 65% balanced accuracy separating meditation from counting, on entropy and aperiodic EEG; 88% sensitivity separating meditation from rest, on low-frequency phase coherence. The sharp edge: the authors found no robust association between the reports and the EEG, so this is a finding about a practice period and about reports, not a neural signature of an experience with little content. | Active |
| THEORY-871 v3 | In two midlife community samples (n = 182 and 176), instructed reappraisal of aversive pictures, mostly by reinterpretation, lowered reported negative affect, while the BOLD responses of the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus and the other subcortical regions that responded to the pictures showed evidence of no change (Bayes factors below 1/10); the emotion-responsive regions it reduced were all cortical, mainly higher visual and parietal | Bo et al. (preprint 2023, published 2024), LIT-1359, read in full from the bioRxiv v2 preprint in NOTE-1061. Reported negative affect fell under reappraisal (d = 0.92, n = 358). Every subcortical region engaged by negative pictures, amygdala subregions and PAG included, showed 10:1 evidence of no change under reappraisal, as did most cortical emotion-responsive regions; the eight regions reduced were all cortical. BOLD and one rating per trial; it does not show that the unchanged response is part of what is felt, though the authors write as if it were. | Active |
| THEORY-873 v2 | Claims to be conscious are produced by an automatic internal model, and since such models are schematic, the intangible, what-it-is-like essence people report is that model’s caricature of a real process, proposed to be attention, or the deep selective processing of information that attention, the global workspace and integration share; a theory that explains how neurons produce a feeling without explaining how the feeling comes to be encoded for report (Arrow B) does not explain the reports | Graziano (2024), LIT-1358, read in full in NOTE-1071: the attention schema theory and its “deep illusionism”, in an essay with no new data. Arrow B is an argument. The identification of the target with attention rests on covariation with report cited from others, and the merging of attention, workspace and integration is asserted. Its “small” illusionism keeps the modelled process real and denies the reported phenomenal essence, so it is the strong illusionism of THEORY-633 with a named target, not the weak kind. | Proposed |
| THEORY-878 | Instructed reappraisal of aversive pictures engages anterior prefrontal, temporo-parietal and cerebellar regions that show evidence of no response to negative emotion generation, beside a larger set of regions engaged both by generation and by reappraisal: in this task part of regulation runs in regions apart from generation, and most of it in regions shared with it | Bo et al. (preprint 2023, published 2024), LIT-1359, read in full from the bioRxiv v2 preprint in NOTE-1061. Two fMRI samples (n = 182 and 176), voxelwise Bayes factors, every effect replicated in both. Sixteen regions are engaged by reappraisal and show 10:1 evidence of no response to negative against neutral pictures without it; fourteen, the larger set, are engaged by both. The selective set best predicts how much reported negative affect falls. One instructed strategy, one stimulus type, BOLD only; nothing shows the selective regions do the regulating. | Proposed |
| THEORY-880 v2 | The specific phenomenal character of an experience is fixed by its place in a quality space, the structure of all the discriminations a sensory system can make, and that structure is mirrored many-to-one in neural feature maps; whether the state is conscious at all is left to a separate general mechanism; so experiences are holistic, a change anywhere in the space can change every experience in it, and spectrum inversion is excluded actually by the asymmetry of colour space and nomologically by its ties to the other senses | Lyre (2022), LIT-1344, read in full in NOTE-1060: neurophenomenal structuralism as a programme. The thesis is assumed and motivated, not shown. Its neural evidence is one cited imaging study of colour in V4. The reduction it draws rests on metaphysically necessary supervenience, which the author says he cannot argue for. It is filed so that the objections read with it, Negro (THEORY-868) and Aldé (THEORY-867), have a stated target. | Proposed |
| THEORY-881 | Across humans, macaques, marmosets and mice, loss of behavioural responsiveness under anaesthesia goes with lower whole-brain pairwise integrated information ΦR in resting fMRI, and its return goes with ΦR’s return, including when central thalamic stimulation restores responsiveness during continued anaesthesia; ΦR tracks the macaque arousal score better than the original Φ, causal density, net information flow or functional connectivity | Luppi et al. (2026), LIT-1357, read in full in NOTE-1064 from the open-access version of record. It extends the same group’s 2024 result (LIT-949, THEORY-240) from human propofol and disorders of consciousness to four species and six regimes, and adds a causal reversal in two macaques. The sharp edge: the state measured is responsiveness, which the authors call “presumably consciousness” and grant is “an imperfect marker of unconsciousness”; the measure is pairwise, linear-Gaussian and content-free; and one mouse regimen fails the main analysis. | Proposed |
| THEORY-883 | Under active inference, the contents of consciousness are posterior beliefs about the hidden states of world, body or brain, and a posterior is conscious when it has the capacity to inform discrete, counterfactual policy selection, at a timescale slow enough to abstract from sensory flux and with enough precision to tell alternatives apart; on this account no conscious content changes without a change in the posterior, and a stimulus given precision by an attention or saccade policy should reach awareness sooner than a retinally matched one | Whyte, Corcoran, Robinson, Smith, Moran, Parr, Friston, Seth & Hohwy (2026), LIT-1364, read in full in NOTE-1062 from arXiv v2. The “hard core” the paper reads off the active inference models of rivalry, access, no-report, interoception and meta-awareness. The first two parts follow from the framework; the criterion of access is “an inference to the best explanation” from what the models needed in order to report. The authors scope it to humans and similar animals and are agnostic elsewhere. Neither prediction has been tested in the paper. | Proposed |
| THEORY-886 | Event boundaries are perceived where perceptual prediction error rises transiently; at those points working-memory event models are reset and opened to sensory input, so that information from before a boundary becomes harder to retrieve after it | Zacks, Speer, Swallow, Braver & Reynolds (2007), LIT-1382, read in full in NOTE-1084 from the PMC author manuscript. Event segmentation theory: a theory and review, with a partial network simulation and mostly correlational evidence. Prediction error is never measured in people, and the one neural prediction checked (anterior cingulate responses at boundaries) failed. It is a theory of a passive observer of others’ activity; it does not cover one’s own intentions, and does not mention the doorway effect. | Proposed |
| THEORY-893 v3 | Reward has separable components: ‘liking’, its hedonic impact, measurable without report by orofacial taste reactivity in humans, apes, monkeys and rodents, and ‘wanting’, its incentive salience; brain stimulation and sensitization can raise ‘wanting’ without raising ‘liking’, so motivation can grow while pleasure stays flat or falls, and ‘liking’ reactions can occur without any subjective feeling of pleasure | Berridge and Kringelbach (2015), read in NOTE-1110. Reward splits into ‘liking’, ‘wanting’ and learning. ‘Liking’ has objective, cross-species orofacial markers. Lateral-hypothalamic stimulation and incentive sensitization raise ‘wanting’, which can grow “even if the drug became less pleasant”. Objective ‘liking’ reactions can occur “without any subjective pleasure feeling at all”. Filed because it bears directly on the record’s reading of valence as ordering-potential (CLAIM-440). | Proposed |
| THEORY-895 v2 | Incentive sensitization: repeated drug exposure can make the mesolimbic ‘wanting’ system lastingly hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts, so that cue-triggered incentive salience grows, persists for years and even increases during abstinence, while ‘liking’ need not rise and may fall; sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose the person’s cognitive desire, and incentive salience can run without any reportable change in feeling | Berridge and Robinson (2016), LIT-1461, read in NOTE-1109 from the PMC author manuscript. A review by the theory’s authors. Strong in rats and moderate in people for drugs; weak for behavioural addictions, where the authors call the evidence emerging and the mechanism unknown. Filed separately from THEORY-893, which holds the liking–wanting dissociation, because what QUESTION-267 and CLAIM-433 need is the sensitization result: a ranking whose strength is re-keyed to cues, cut loose from both pleasure and the person’s goals, and lasting. | Proposed |
| THEORY-909 v2 | As reviewed by Gerstner et al. (2018) from five papers, mostly in slices and one laboratory per region, pairing pre- and postsynaptic activity changed the synapse when a neuromodulator or plateau potential followed within about 1 s in striatum, within 5 s (noradrenaline, LTP after pre-before-post pairing) or 2.5 s (serotonin, LTD after post-before-pre pairing) in visual and prefrontal cortex, and within about 2 s in CA1, and not at longer delays; the reviewers read this as a decaying synaptic eligibility trace and as experimental support for three-factor learning rules on behavioural time scales | Gerstner, Lehmann, Liakoni, Corneil & Brea (2018), LIT-1494, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1130. A review of five experimental papers, 2014–2017 (Yagishita; He; Brzosko 2015 and 2017; Bittner), not new data. Mostly slices, one laboratory per region; the minute-scale CA1 result may be consolidation. The reviewers grant that other mechanisms could bridge the same gap. | Active |
| THEORY-923 v2 | In one simulated T-maze task with hand-set parameters, run once per condition, an active inference agent’s habit, learned by counting its own state transitions and policy choices, emerged from goal-directed behaviour, and once acquired it persisted, and reinforced itself, after the reward was devalued, while an agent devalued before acquisition switched at once | Friston, FitzGerald, Rigoli, Schwartenbeck, O’Doherty & Pezzulo (2016), LIT-1476, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1138. One simulated T-maze task. The habit is one more policy scored by posterior probability; its prior and transitions grow by count, not by reward. It shows persistence under devaluation, a cached mapping failing when what is appropriate changes; it does not show amortization, and its reaction times are simulation run times. | Active |
| THEORY-1110 | Shenhav, Botvinick and Cohen propose that control is allocated top-down by a dedicated specifying system: dACC computes the expected value of a control signal, its probability-weighted payoff less an intrinsic cost rising with intensity, and specifies the signal that lateral prefrontal and subcortical structures implement | What the expected-value-of-control paper proposes, split from THEORY-070 by the sixth status review (ADR-058’s route) so that a claim needing only the proposal can stand on it. The paper was read in full (NOTE-446), so the reading of what it proposes is held. Whether the proposal is true, a fit of the computation and a dissociation of specifying from implementing, stays THEORY-070’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1178 | In slices of striatum, visual and prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, Hebbian co-activation leaves a synaptic eligibility trace, lasting about 1 s in striatum, 3 to 10 s in cortex and about 2 s in CA1, that a later neuromodulator or plateau potential converts into a weight change and whose sign it can set: experimental support for three-factor learning rules on behavioural time scales | The wide form THEORY-909 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-909, Active, is its evidence. Gerstner, Lehmann, Liakoni, Corneil & Brea (2018), LIT-1494, read five experimental papers as a decaying eligibility trace whose conversion, and direction, a third factor sets, and as support for three-factor rules on behavioural time scales; the evidence is mostly slices, one laboratory per region, and the reviewers grant that other mechanisms could bridge the gap. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1179 | In an active-inference model of post-traumatic context inference, an overly precise prior that one is in a harmful context makes exploratory sampling look uninformative, so the agent attenuates the periphery, never receives the evidence that would correct the prior, and the belief sustains itself; lowering precision removes the symptoms without correcting the prior | The wide form THEORY-285 held before the eighth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-285, Active, is its evidence. Linson et al. (2025), LIT-983, recast post-traumatic stress as lost context disambiguation and offer the loop as its mechanism; their simulations show it once per phenotype, with unreported parameters, and fit no patient data. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1191 | In a simulated active inference agent, a habit learned by counting the agent’s own state transitions and policy choices emerges from goal-directed behaviour, and once acquired it persists, and reinforces itself, after the reward is devalued, while an agent devalued before acquisition switches at once | The wide form THEORY-923 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-923, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1196 | During a visual decision task, neurons within a single area of mouse cortex rarely form discrete functional types, yet the task conditions the area distinguishes are linearly separable in nearly every way | The wide form of Posani et al. (2026), LIT-708, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-124 to what their analysis of the IBL Brainwide Map measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that cortical representations are rarely categorical and highly separable. One task, overtrained mice, eight variables and a lenient separability criterion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1237 | Instructed reappraisal lowers reported negative affect to aversive pictures while the responses of the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus and other subcortical regions to the same pictures show evidence of no change; the regions it reduces are cortical, mainly higher visual and parietal | The wider thesis Bo et al. assert (“subcortical affective processes are less modifiable by reappraisal than previously thought”, p. 20), filed beside THEORY-871 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-871, Active, holds what their two midlife samples measured under one instructed strategy. Whether the result holds for reappraisal at large is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-871’s old condition, without the version-of-record clause. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1241 | Experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners report more pure awareness than matched counting controls, and multivariate EEG separates the meditation period from counting and from rest, but the reports are not shown to track any EEG feature | The general form of Chandia-Jorquera et al.’s finding, filed beside THEORY-870 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-870, Active, holds what the one study measured; whether practitioners in general report more pure awareness, robustly to demand, and whether EEG separates the practice from other effortless ones, is this entry’s question. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1242 | In early-vision tasks, human performance varies across conditions as the information available at the retinal output does, while falling well below the retinal-stage ideal, so substantial losses lie in central factors | The thesis Geisler’s review asserts, filed beside THEORY-336 by the status review of 2026-10-30 (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-336, Active, holds what the review reports; whether the parallel holds is this entry’s question, and none of the primary stage-by-stage studies (Geisler 1989; Banks, Geisler and Bennett 1987) is read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1299 | Pure awareness, on Metzinger’s account, is the content of a temporally thin model of the organism’s own tonic alertness, its capacity to know; experience in this minimal form lacks an egoic self-model, a first-person perspective, time, space and even phenomenal oneness, but not self-modelling, and tonic alertness that is not so modelled is not experienced | Metzinger (2020), LIT-1946, read in full in NOTE-1498, and Metzinger (2024), LIT-1943, skimmed in NOTE-1499. MPE is “an inner representation of tonic alertness”, “non-egoic self-modelling” that “definitely has representational content”. In the 2024 sketch it is “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the system’s epistemic openness, which “really endows the content generated on all lower-order levels with phenomenality”. It is a hypothesis fitted to retrospective reports. It does not say that consciousness needs no model of the system, only that it needs no model of a knowing self. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1301 | In the Haken–Kelso–Bunz potential V(φ) = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ, switching the parameters in time from no landscape (a = b = 0) to two wells (a = b = 1) to one well (a = 1, b = 0) makes the spread of the relative phase across trials rise while both wells are open and fall after one is removed, the pattern Sánchez-Cañizares compares qualitatively with post-stimulus quenching of trial-to-trial variability in decision tasks; under Gaussian white noise of the stated strength q = 1 the spread of cos φ settles near 0.40, not at 0 | Sánchez-Cañizares (2026), LIT-1992, read in full in NOTE-1506 from the publisher’s open-access PDF. Active for the model’s behaviour, which this reading checked: the bistability condition |a| < 4b analytically, and the rise and fall by re-simulation (20,000 paths). The paper’s statement that the spread decreases “to 0” holds without noise and fails at q = 1. It does not say that the model fits the cited EEG data, which the author calls “only qualitative”, or that the parameter changes are the mind’s (THEORY-1302). | Active |
| THEORY-1302 | Sánchez-Cañizares reinterprets Irruption Theory for binary decisions (IAT*): irruption is the onset of a landscape with one attractor per option and absorption the passage to a single attractor, both correlated in mind and brain, reversing the sign of Froese’s variance hypothesis; the mind’s causal role is to set the landscape’s control parameters by “selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining”, not to push the state, so on this account the mind controls which outcomes exist and not which one the state reaches | Sánchez-Cañizares (2026), LIT-1992, read in full in NOTE-1506. The interpretation is the paper’s (pp. 6–7, 18–20); the last clause is this reading’s description of the control architecture it implies, from the model and simulation of pp. 8–12, in which the choice between wells is settled by initial condition and noise. Proposed: the paper says IAT* “cannot be tested with empirical results without further assumptions” (p. 7). Bears on CLAIM-533 and QUESTION-071. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1312 | A phase-amplitude coupling measure can be significant when only one non-sinusoidal rhythm is present, because the rhythm’s harmonics carry amplitude that depends on its own phase; such coupling is confined to bands spanning the rhythm’s harmonics, so a measured coupling is evidence of one rhythm modulating another only after waveform shape is controlled | Donoghue, Schaworonkow and Voytek (2021), LIT-1999, §5 and Fig. 5D–E, read in NOTE-1529 from the PsyArXiv preprint, standing on Kramer et al. 2008 and Cole et al. 2017. Active: checked by a short simulation in which a sharp-peaked 10 Hz wave gave a modulation index of 0.021 between its phase and 25–60 Hz amplitude against 0.0001 for a cosine, and none in a single-harmonic or an 80–250 Hz band. It does not say any particular published PAC is an artefact, nor that broadband coupling far above the harmonics is. | Active |
| THEORY-1314 | Contextual emergence, on which an emergent phenomenon’s parts are necessary but not sufficient, needs a functional boundary between the phenomenon and its context, without which the context could be folded into the base and the account collapse into weak emergence or global supervenience; and the subject of attention is contextually emergent in this sense, its boundary being the skull, meninges and brain stem, so that its macro-level patterns constrain micro-level activity with a power that is not reducible to the parts and needs neither downward nor circular causation | Jennings (2026), LIT-1963, §§4–6, read in NOTE-1508, with Bishop and Atmanspacher 2006 (LIT-1987) and Bishop, Silberstein and Pexton 2022 (LIT-1993), both unread, for contextual emergence. The boundary condition is the paper’s own addition (fn. 15). Proposed, with a sharp edge: the paper’s reason that the boundary resists micro redescription is that its properties “are macro-level ones” (p. 20), which is the point at issue, and its neural evidence fits weak emergence too. Bears on CLAIM-334, whose supervenience premise it denies. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1317 | During held covert spatial attention in human fronto-parietal and visual cortex, the amplitude of broadband high gamma (80–250 Hz) is coupled to the phase of an endogenous 2–5 Hz rhythm, more strongly for the contralateral field, and the trial-by-trial strength of that coupling correlates with faster detection; the evidence is correlational, so it shows that the coupling tracks attention, not that it improves it | Szczepanski et al. (2014), LIT-1982, read in NOTE-1528 from the publisher’s open-access PDF. Active for what it states: the reported counts (123 of 273 electrodes coupled; 55 stronger contralaterally; 28 correlating with RT, r(41) = −0.51 and r(47) = −0.37 in the examples) were checked against the text, and the ERP and power controls are in it. The sharp edge is the causal one: no manipulation of the coupling was made, and the paper’s “facilitate” and Jennings’s “improve” outrun it. | Active |
| THEORY-1326 | In Voigt’s model of hard decisions, when two options are valued equally the value differential is too small to choose (conflict, dACC), and the tie is broken during the choice by fixation: precuneus allocates spatial attention bottom-up to the salient item and dlPFC holds it in working memory, which both settles the choice and raises that item’s value, a change that lasts only if the choice is remembered (hippocampus) | Voigt (2022), LIT-1976, an Opinion article read in NOTE-1517. The model is the author’s “tentative” synthesis, resting mainly on Voigt et al. 2019 (not held) in which fixation duration and dlPFC and precuneus activity predicted later preference change; the causal role of gaze is imported from other studies. Proposed. The sharp edge for its use by Jennings (THEORY-1341): the attentional step is bottom-up capture by salience, not top-down prefrontal feedback. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1329 | On Kane’s account, self-forming actions occur under motivational conflict, when tension moves the relevant brain regions away from thermodynamic equilibrium, “a kind of stirring up of chaos” that makes them sensitive to micro-indeterminacy at the neuronal level, so that the choice is undetermined | Kane (2009), LIT-1984, p. 39, read in NOTE-1518. Kane’s neural hypothesis, stated without evidence in this paper. Proposed: it is an empirical claim about brains for which the paper gives none, and the record holds nothing that measures it. It is the attribution CLAIM-533 makes to Kane, now checked against his text. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1337 | Neural field recordings carry aperiodic 1/f-like activity with power at every frequency, whose exponent varies with age, state and task; so power in a band, correlated power changes across bands, and ratios of band power can arise from the aperiodic component with no oscillation changing, and 1/f structure is a ubiquitous background of field data rather than a mark of any particular organization | Donoghue, Schaworonkow and Voytek (2021), LIT-1999, §§1 and 3, read in NOTE-1529. Active: the spectral argument is elementary (an aperiodic signal has power at all frequencies, and a change in its exponent moves every band), and the simulations and cited cases (the ADHD theta/beta ratio) are in the text. It does not say aperiodic activity is noise without physiological meaning; the paper calls it “a physiologically informative feature”. | Active |
| THEORY-1340 | Training forms a task-defined, low-dimensional subregion of prefrontal and premotor population activity (a preparatory subspace, an axis of choice organized as a line attractor) that constrains a monkey’s delayed response top down, holding behavior to what the task requires while the trial’s cue and evidence select within it; Juarrero’s reading of Churchland et al. 2012 and Mante, Sussillo et al. 2013 as governing constraints and as neural correlates of prior and proximate intentions | Juarrero (2023), LIT-1995, ch. 15 (pp. 223–232), read in NOTE-1532; the primary studies are not held. The subspaces and their predictive power are the studies’ findings as the chapter reports them. That the subspace controls behavior top down, is “the standing cause of the response” (p. 230) and correlates with prior and proximate intentions (pp. 229–231) is the book’s reading. Proposed for that step: the evidence reported is dimensionality reduction, prediction and a network simulation, with no intervention on the pattern. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1341 | In Jennings’s hybrid account, attention is prioritization of processing by a subject that is the whole collection of an organism’s fixed, formed and fluid interests, separated from filtering by whether selection answers to that collection, marked by feedback from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; when interests are equally weighted, attention breaks the stalemate and updates the chosen option’s value, so that a fluid interest becomes a formed one | Jennings (2026), LIT-1963, §6, read in NOTE-1508. The operational half of the paper: what attention is, how it is told from filtering, and how it forms interests. The stalemate mechanism is taken from Voigt 2022 (LIT-1976), registered unread. Proposed because the criterion is inferred, not tested, and the paper reports no data. It does not say the subject is contextually emergent (THEORY-1314) or that attention is the source of a free will. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1346 | In rat cortical slices with synapses blocked, extracellular fields of the local field potential’s size, applied by an electrode, shift the membrane potential of layer 5 pyramidal neurons by less than 0.5 mV at frequencies up to 100 Hz and, with spiking driven by current, phase-lock spike times without changing spike counts, most effectively for slow fields, and synchronize nearby neurons; the authors explain the effect by Kirchhoff’s circuit laws and a fixed firing threshold | Anastassiou et al. (2011), LIT-1953, read in NOTE-1516 from the gwern.net scan at the owner’s direction. Active as a statement of what the experiments measured, which the paper reports with sizes, samples and corrected tests. It does not say that the fields neurons generate do this in vivo, that ephaptic coupling bears on attention or experience, or that it is evidence against micro-level description, which is the use Jennings makes of it (LIT-1963, p. 35). | Active |