How neurons use crowdsourcing to make decisions -- ScienceDaily 25/05/2020, 8:06 pm

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How neurons use crowdsourcing to make decisions

Date: June 6, 2017

Source: Santa Fe Institute

Summary: When many individual neurons collect data, how do they reach a unanimous decision? New
research from a collective computation group suggests a two-phase process.

FULL STORY

How do we make decisions? Or rather, how do our neurons make decisions for us?
Do individual neurons have a strong say or is the voice in the neural collective?

One way to think about this question is to ask how many of my neurons you would have to observe to read
my mind. If you can predict I am about to say the word "grandma" by watching one of my neurons then we
could say our decisions can be attributed to single, perhaps "very vocal," neurons. In neuroscience such
neurons are called "grandmother" neurons after it was proposed in the 1960's that there may be single
neurons that uniquely respond to complex and important percepts like a grandmother's face.

On the other hand, if you can only read my mind by polling many of my neurons then it would appear the
decision a collective one, distributed across hundreds, thousands, or even millions of neurons. A big de‐
bate in neuroscience is whether single-neuron encoding or distributed encoding is most relevant for under‐
standing how the brain functions.

In fact, both may be right. In research recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Bryan Daniels, Jes‐
sica Flack, and David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute's collective computation group (C4) tackle this
problem using data recorded from the neurons of a macaque monkey tasked by the experimenter with
making a simple decision.

In an area of the brain involved in the decision-making process, Daniels and colleagues find that as the
monkey initially processes the data, polling many neurons is required to get a good prediction of the mon‐
key's decision. Then, as the time for committing to a decision approaches, this pattern shifts. The neurons
start to agree and eventually each one on its own is maximally predictive. Hence at first the "neural voice"
is heterogeneous and collective, but as the neurons get close to the decision point, the "neural voice" be‐
comes homogenous and, in a sense, individualistic, as any neuron on its own is sufficient to read the mon‐
key's mind.

Daniels says a possible explanation for this odd behavior is that the system has two tasks to solve. It must
gather good information from noisy data and it must use this information to produce a coherent decision.
To find regularities in the input it polls many individual neurons, as the crowd's answer is more reliable than

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How neurons use crowdsourcing to make decisions -- ScienceDaily 25/05/2020, 8:06 pm

any single neuron's when the data are noisy. But, as Krakauer says, ultimately a decision has to be made.
The neurons agree on an answer by sharing their information to come to a consensus.

This explanation echoes results in other collective systems, from animal societies to systems studied in
statistical physics. Flack says this commonality suggests a general principle of collective computation: It
has two phases -- an information accumulation phase that uses crowdsourcing to collect reliable informa‐
tion and a consensus phase that allows the system to act.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Santa Fe Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Bryan C. Daniels, Jessica C. Flack, David C. Krakauer. Dual Coding Theory Explains Biphasic Col‐
lective Computation in Neural Decision-Making. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2017; 11 DOI:
10.3389/fnins.2017.00313

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