The units of thought

What is the nature of thought? And what is the resting state? Moshe Bar and colleagues argues in a new paper (PDF) in the journal Hippocampus that besides the long-held idea that associative processing provides the vehicle of thought, that “one primary outcome of associative processing is the generation of predictions, which approximate the immediately relevant future and thus facilitate perception, action, and the progression of thought”.

From the article:

Associations are proposed to provide the units of thought,b ut they should not be perceived as the actual content of thought; they merely provide the vehicle for linking related representations. In fact, our proposal is that the primary role of associations and associative activation is to generate predictions, which guide our actions, expectations, plans, and thoughts. To elaborate on this it will be useful to consider our broader theoretical framework: We propose that rather than passively ‘‘waiting’’ to be activated by sensations, the human brain is constantly busy generating predictions that approximate the immediate, directly relevant, future. Building on previous work, this proposal posits that rudimentary information is first extracted rapidly from a perceptual input, and then used to derive analogies linking the input with the most similar representations in memory. The linked stored representations in turn selectively activate the associations that are relevant in the specific context, which provides focused, testable predictions. These predictions facilitate perception and cognition by presensitizing representations all the way downstream to primary cortices. For example, we see a fork, the image of which will

The units of thought.

Bar M, Aminoff E, Mason M, Fenske M
Hippocampus. 2007; 17(6): 420-8

That associative processing provides the vehicle of thought is a long-standing idea. We describe here observations from cognitive neuroimaging that elucidate the neural processing that mediates this element. This account further allows a more specific ascription of a cognitive function to the brain’s “default” activity in mindwandering. We extend this account to argue that one primary outcome of associative processing is the generation of predictions, which approximate the immediately relevant future and thus facilitate perception, action, and the progression of thought.

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